The Accountant: How movies differ from books by Kait Carson

 

My husband and I have a penchant for picking up movies from the Walmart discount bin. Sometimes we enjoy them. Other times, we can’t make it through the first five minutes. It’s like putting your hand in a grade school grab bag. Ya never know what you’re gonna get. The determining factor is storyline.

 Movies, because they are visual, can get away with more story problems than books. Watching the story unfold moves the mind from scene to scene with little to no time for introspection. To a certain extent, books do the same. The reader moves from chapter to chapter much as the viewer moves from scene to scene. In a movie, the action takes place in front of the viewer. A novel’s action takes place in the mind of a reader. If the reader finds inconsistencies, their mind goes to work to resolve them. If the author doesn’t do the same at some point—bang—book hits the wall.

The Accountant is a 2016 movie starring Ben Affleck. Hard not to like it on casting alone. It tells the story of Christian Wolff, a high-functioning autistic child who is a math savant. Wolff’s parents take the child to an innovative school, hoping to cure him. Learning that a cure is not possible, but a normal life is, leads his career army father to undertake Chris’s education and cure on his own. Think tough love and add in martial arts and weapons education. Chris’s facility with numbers leads him to become an accountant, a money-launderer, go-to guy to uncover embezzlers for his organized crime clients, and a vigilante. Not necessarily in that order. He has both a moral code and self-awareness. While there are aspects of his personality he cannot control, he is in total control of his behavior. Throughout the movie, he takes his marching orders, via telephone, from an unnamed woman. I can’t be more specific. It would be a spoiler.

The first time I watched the movie, the violence was off-putting. So much so that I ignored the story. Last week we watched it again. This time, I watched it as if I was reading a book. There was a perfect symmetry to the story. The threads established by the opening scenes run seamlessly through the rest of the movie. The ending makes perfect sense—although the setup is too contrived to survive developmental editors. Tension builds with each scene, and Chris’s character changes and grows in a believable way. This second viewing made me realize the story is not about the action, it’s about Chris Wolff and his journey through life. It’s a pure redemption story and from that point of view, never strikes a wrong note.

 As a writer, I’m familiar with Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. It’s an essential “beat sheet” for movie scripting. The Accountant originated in script form and hit every one of the beats. As a writer, I’m also familiar with the work that goes into connecting those beats. The action story of The Accountant moved from beat to beat with little connection. The redemption story filled in the blanks between the beats, but wasn’t developed until the second half of the movie. This format worked in a visual medium. It would be a much harder sell in a novel where the reader would look for a reason to care.

Readers and writers, do you prefer movies written directly for the screen or those adapted from books? If you prefer those adapted from books, do you find the movies hit all the highlights or move apart on their own trajectory?