Coppola earns mega-brownie points for sticking so closely to the book. This is one of the very few films that not only resembles the book but actually is the book. Yes, she changed some minor details so that the film flowed better--I think authors assume their readers have the virtue of patience if merely from the fact that the reader chose to pick up a book rather than turn the TV on, but sometimes that just isn’t true and thankfully Coppola realizes this--but she stuck pretty damn close to the book. She even manages to capture the feel of the book…so hopeful in the beginning, so dank and depressing in the end. Kudos, Sofia. I can now almost forgive your family for the The Godfather: Part III. Almost.

Coppola not only does the book justice, she takes it and makes it beautiful, visual and ethereal. As a filmmaker, she makes lots of interesting choices--using warm, glowing colors throughout the film, lots of yellows, oranges, reds, and lots of white for the girls to highlight their blond hair; capturing the 1970s extremely well, she doesn’t go over the top with it, and you can tell that she actually did her homework and looked at pictures from the era to do costume and set design; using freeze frames with bubble-lettered captions to introduce the Lisbon girls and give us our only real clarification to which one is freakin’ which! She also found a then unknown French band Air and let the duo write the soundtrack, and it makes the perfect music for the film…moody but still elegant.

One of my favorite of her choices is the way she cuts away from the linear film with flashbacks, fantasies and also layers other characters’ commenting dialogue on top of the scenes they are commenting about. She also uses close-ups with sly purpose to highlight a character's mindset right before another character will break into the frame, change the first character’s mindset and then quickly leave. (See Lux in movie theater when Trip returns to call her a stone fox;Trip in the car when Lux comes out to kiss him for the first time.)

One thing that is much commented on in reviews is the narration of the book, which also appears in the film: first-person plural. It’s a style so rare that I had to look up which one it was (It’s the “We” format.) Given that there is only one narrator, the 'We' adds to the sense of grouping that there is to the boys. The obsession is never taken on or increased by only one of them but by them all as a whole. One can narrate, and it represents the whole. Stylistically, this works oh-so-well in the film. By using this point of view, the narrator is also directly speaking to you, the reader or moviegoer. In the book, the narrator actually has dialogue with you. It’s unconventional but works quite well.

What really strikes me about this film is the emotional state it puts you in. I enjoy movies, I get into them, I feel for the characters. But only rarely like this. I squirmed at the strictness of the Lisbon household. I was downright uncomfortable, having grown up in a household with more rules than I cared to follow, many of them religion-based. It was hard for me to watch the progression of the girls being asked to the dance, going to the dance and then seeing the consequences. I felt like I was there with the girls, almost as if Mrs. Lisbon were in the room with me (a scary thought, indeed).

When the girls died, it hit me hard. I should mention here that I have seen the movie before, at least twice, maybe even three times previously, yet I was still invested in the film and still hoping that this time something different might happen, and the Lisbon girls might make it after all. The fantasy of the boys driving the Lisbon girls to Florida was so real that I thought that maybe this time the girls would make it. And then they didn’t. I was quite torn up.

The book captures you similarly; you have this sense of dread as you are reading, knowing from the title that these girls aren’t going to make it out alive but hoping so desperately that they will. It has been a few years since a book has grabbed me quite like that and made me care that much about the characters. The book does it, the film does it. Amazing.

So my only real beef with the movie is the ending…and it's not even really beef. Coppola switched up the ending of the book--yes, this is a spoiler, stop reading this paragraph and skip to the next one if you don’t want to know the end. In the book, Mary Lisbon doesn’t die with Lux, Bonnie and Therese. She survives her attempt (the gas oven hadn’t sufficiently cooked her brain enough) and lives a short while after, even returning to the Lisbon home with her parents. She makes a dramatic exit from life a bit later, having made herself up so the funeral home wouldn’t have to, and then taking a note from Therese on how to successfully commit suicide, she swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. In the book, this makes the suicides that much more tragic. Cinematically, it wouldn’t have worked. The suicides pack a much bigger punch when all the girls die together, and it provides a solid climax to the movie. I’ll give Coppola brownie points for her directorial and screenwriting skills here…good call on the ending. (How often can you say good call when a book’s ending is changed in the movie version? Kudos, Sofia, kudos.)

My favorite part to dissect: casting! Kirsten Dunst was perfect as Lux, the golden girl and “stone fox” of the Lisbon sisters. She just looks so young and svelte that she can pull off fourteen despite being a few years older. Bonnie, Mary and Therese are all played by somewhat attractive blondes that all resemble each other (and really don’t stand out from each other at all…which fits perfectly with the idea that the girls were an entity, “the girls”, rather than separate beings. In the book, the boys in fact cannot always tell them apart.)

Josh Hartnett joins the cast as Trip Fontaine in one of his earliest roles (Remember that time before Pearl Harbor-the movie, when he wasn’t famous but was still oh-dear-god-gorgeous? This was that time.) He plays the part perfectly, also pulling off high school despite being more college-age. Of course, his role was being the guy all girls want to sleep with. How difficult for him! Really though, he did it justice, as did the older version of Trip, Michael Pare.

And then the cast-members that everyone knows but no one knows is in the movie? (Hint: There are two of them!) One of my favorite actors, Giovanni Ribisi is the narrator, and Hadyn Christensen in an early role is Joe Hill Conley, who takes Bonnie to the dance. Christensen is unremarkable in so small a role, but more kudos to Coppola for recognizing future stardom in him (and in Josh Hartnett.)

My only casting complaint is Kathleen Turner as the mother. One of the lines from both book and movie is that the boys cannot fathom how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had five beautiful daughters. Seriously, can you imagine Kathleen Turner without beautiful daughters? Isn’t she a classic Hollywood sex symbol? They frumped her up for the part, but she’s Kathleen Turner. Come on now.

Overall, though, the casting was phenomenal, especially in the unknown talent, such as Jonathon Tucker who was amazing as Tim Weiner. Everyone in the film did their parts beautifully, which goes back to how awesome a director Coppola is. More kudos. (Yup, that’s three.)

So what I’m trying to say here is that the book is amazing, the film is amazing, I highly recommend immersing yourself in both, but if you only have time for one, don’t sweat it. They are so much the same that you get the story whether from the book or the film. The book is slightly more detailed, the film has an ethereal quality that the book doesn’t quite achieve, so take your pick. Neither Eugenides nor Coppola will do you wrong.