It is no secret that book to movie adaptations and I have a long, fraught history. Namely I have incredibly high, exacting standards that these films consistently fail to meet. However, being graced with the wisdom of old age and having tempered my feverish, detail-oriented obsession with accuracy, I was more than willing to lower my standards and give the silver screen version of Sally Thorne’s bestselling book The Hating Game a pretty fair chance.
Being a college student, having time to read for pleasure is both a rarity and a luxury. As a senior, I’ve found that falling back into old patterns where I could read a book for fun instead of endlessly trawling through the same three social media apps has brought back a piece of me I didn’t even realize I was missing. I had the opportunity to read the source material in the earlier days of the pandemic, when everything felt like an extended spring break where we were still baking bread and moaning about toilet paper being sold out.
The book was a recommendation from a dear friend, who’s good taste I trust far more than my own. Everything about The Hating Game ticked off the boxes in my checklist of favorite tropes. It had a sassy, bookish protagonist, who butts heads with a sarcastic and stoic coworker. The enemies-to-lovers trope is unfortunately my not-so-secret weakness.The romance was realistic, well-paced, and passionate while carefully balancing a mix of endearingly fluffy moments and sizzling tension between the two main leads. Whats not to like? So it’s safe to say that when I heard The Hating Game was green lit for a movie deal I was over the moon and then some.
In preparation for the release I read, re-read, and re-re-read the book. I was constantly checking for production updates and excitedly sought out casting news for all the quirky characters Thorne expertly fleshes out in the pages of the novel. When December 10th rolled around I was more than ready to rent the film on Amazon prime. The slight roadblock of fall semester finals obviously delayed this process. However the setback merited yet another read of the book during winter break. Tearing my ACL gave me ample time to sit down and savor every single minute of the movie. Or, I tried to enjoy every second. Can’t really say I succeeded.
The movie was like a Sparknotes summary that served key details with none of the depth of detail that came with a nuanced understanding of the text. While remaining a faithful adaptation to the book, the movie failed in delivering the emotional beats tied to the major plot events of the story. What makes us root for these characters? What has us on the edge of our seats hoping they will finally get their heads out of their asses in order to see what’s all too obvious to the audience? What has us invested in this relationship? Well, based on the movie, the answer to all of the above is a whole lot of nothing.
The driving force in most well-written realistic fiction pieces is the characters. If the author is working with a small scale setting, then the world they build must revolve around the characters and their choices. Character-driven stories allow the audience to get up close and personal with a small cast of individuals in ways the high-stakes, fast-paced plot-driven fantasy epics cannot. Sally Thorne excels in creating a mini-universe within the setting of the story that revolves solely around the characters. We get to know the main leads incredibly well over the course of her books. As readers we resonate with their motivations, trials, triumphs, and traumas. This is notably difficult to translate to the screen.
Filmmakers can’t spend as much time diving into character backstories, but they hold the distinct advantage of being able to show things as opposed to spending pages going into how a character walked, and talked, and contorted their face with an amalgamation of emotions swirling in their eyes. Where the film adaptation of The Hating Game fails most acutely is in the respect of building up the characters, and implicitly showing their characterization instead of wasting time on cinematic wide shots and corny montages. Without giving spoilers, the underperformance in this area completely takes away from the impact of the inciting incident of the first act. We fail to see the conflicting emotions the characters are feeling. We rarely if ever understand what the characters are feeling, and thus don’t understand the reason they act the way they do as we would in the book.
Outside of this critique as an avid fan of the book, one might wonder if the movie is enjoyable as its own standalone. It is possible for failed book adaptations to be enjoyable movies outside of their relation to the source material. One such example would be the Harry Potter or Percy Jackson movies, with the latter notably drawing the ire of the author who refused to watch them. The movie for The Hating Game feels like just another generic rom-com where complexity is sacrificed for steamy scenes in the hopes of getting views. It’s not awful, but it’s really not anything to write home about.
Bottom line, I gave it a chance. I was open-minded. At the end of the day, adaptations from literature are just not for me.