Compare And Contrast Benjamin Hood

As a particularly judgmental reader, I depend on narrator reliability a lot. Novels, for the most part, are tales of the human struggle and experience and all of the mistakes and successes they come along with. If I am reading about every dirty little secret in a family, I need at least an accurate portrayal of their motivations in order to come to a conclusion on their characters. From personal experience, I can say that one of the hardest parts of coming from a unhappy or divorced couple family is that realizing that our parents’ relationship is not what is considered normal. Growing up in a family like this and then writing about it can alter the reality of the events that took place. Paul is in no way an unbiased onlooker. In Rick Moody’s
novel The Ice Storm, the narrator’s identity is a mystery until the end, and in the film adaptation Paul is revealed as the narrator in the opening scene. The decision to reveal Paul as narrator in the beginning of the movie allows for the viewer to prepare for his prejudice and see the characters of The Ice Storm more honestly. The book version of Benjamin Hood makes a less than superb impression on us.
He comes off as uncaring, unfaithful, and at times creepy. In the movie, Ben acts almost the same way, but he seems more human like he has good intentions but keeps messing up in spite of them. We see some of his attempts to be affectionate with Elena. We see that his relationship with Janey has a lot more to it than just sex, as much as he would like to think otherwise. These differences are in part because in the book Ben’s thoughts seem to be his own and we see him messing up, but without the good intentions; however, in the movie we can see how Paul’s anger at his father’s affair could influence his perception of his father’s motivations, thoughts, and feelings. He did not have the distance necessary to see his father’s real reasons for his extra-marital affair thereby possibly influencing the authenticity of Ben’s
chapters. In the novel Ben explains his marriage to Elena as “one of indebtedness” (Moody, 14).
I do not know what excuse Elena would have for marrying someone she never really felt love and connection with. Maybe it was a convenient marriage for both of them, but in this book, there are times where they show they care about each other, but there are never moments where they show that they were ever truly in love with each other. Elena’s character in the book is one of the only characters who is more relatable in the book than in the movie. For the most part Ben receives the bulk of the criticism in the book and Elena seems like someone who has been betrayed in her marriage and the lack of love in her life has closed her off and forced her to become cynical, cold, and distant. Paul’s different depiction of her in the book was probably from seeing her as the victim in his parent’s marriage. The movie, giving us more of an objective point of view, allows us to see that it takes two to have an unloving
marriage. Wendy, for me, was the strongest character in the family. Her book self was curious, adventurous, and confident for a pubescent girl. She was not always in the right. Her relationship with Sandy was weird, uncomfortable, and definitely a little inappropriate, but she was strong and despite her parents she took chances with affection and relationships. She was brave in her relationships which is really admirable considering her upbringing, but she also was brave because she was so desperate for the affection she was not receiving from her parents. The main difference between book and movie Wendy is how bold she was in her exploits and the severity of them. In the book she came off as much more sure of herself in those scenes and in the movie it was a lot more situational and she was less of an instigator. As her big brother, Paul takes Wendy’s exploits much more seriously. His little sister is doing things with boys that he is not even having done with him. He saw Wendy’s situations and the added boldness was to emphasize how much their parents’ marriage was really affecting her. Paul Hood’s narration greatly contributed to the way readers see and understand the characters in Moody’s novel The Ice Storm. The movie adaptation’s upfront unveiling of Paul as the narrator gave the audience the distance it needed to see the characters fairly and without prejudice. In the novel, the narration was similar to that of an omniscient narrator and because the book did not reveal who it was, it was easy to forget that it was not an omniscient narrator. I often forgot that there was a narrator, and I accepted everything as one hundred percent factual, but Paul cannot possibly be and objective point of view. Originally what I believed to be Ben, Elena, and Wendy’s true thoughts, was not at all, but instead they were what Paul believed there thoughts and motivations were. With everything that one difference made, I still enjoyed both the book and the movie. The book, despite it’s subjective narrator, portrayed the difficulties faced when in a dysfunctional family, and the movie allowed me to empathize with those same characters more.