Beautiful Creatures really filled a hole in my life that I didn’t even know was there. Retrospectively, this shouldn’t have been that surprising to me: I love Gone With The Wind, I love The Craft, and I especially love the confederacy-meets-supernatural trapping of The Vampire Diaries. A story about teen love and witch wars and the Gothic South is practically racing up my alley. I was very excited to see how this carried over from the book, and vice versa.
The book Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl, is the first volume in the Casters series. It is about Ethan Wate, a restless boy from the Southern small town of Gatlin, who falls for the mysterious new girl, Lena Duchannes. He becomes quickly embroiled in her family dramas — which unfortunately include Civil War-era curses, witchcraft, and a struggle between good and evil.
The film hit on so many notes that were unexpectedly satisfying: like a male lead who is adorable and snarky, instead of just trying to bowl us over with his broody stoicism. Like a YA couple I can really root for, who seem excited and enchanted by each other, instead of just in love because that’s the way it is. Like Jeremy Irons looking insanely dapper in his three-piece suit.
The first thing I noticed picking up the book Beautiful Creatures was that it was narrated by the male protagonist, Ethan. Supernatural YA fiction is so dominated by female narrators that this immediately stood out to me, and went a long way in explaining why Ethan in the film was so likable. The movie Beautiful Creatures did a really fantastic job of transposing his character in the book onto the big screen. This includes both visual cues — like Ethan’s book map in his room, or the fact that he always wears stupid T-shirts — and emotional ones — book!Ethan never actually spoils the end of Titanic for Lena in the throes of an awkward ramble (as he does in the film), but I can picture him doing it in a heartbeat.
One thing that the book had over the film was a deeper exploration of Ethan’s relationship with his father. In the movie Beautiful Creatures, Ethan’s grief over the loss of his mother is heavily explored, but the loss of his father, who has turned into a reclusive shut-in, is all but glossed over. I was sorry to lose this, because it created a nice touchstone for Ethan’s initial feelings of connection with Lena: He considered them both under the patronage of the town shut-ins, as Lena’s Uncle Macon was infamous for being Gatlin’s Boo Radley.
Lena’s characterization also resonates more strongly in the book. While the film Beautiful Creatures does offer up a female lead who is likable and relatable (if a little bit cranky), the book does a really amazing job of showing us how vulnerable Lena is. She talks to Ethan about how she wants to fit in, and she wants other kids at school to like her, and we ache for her, because everybody knows what it is like to feel weird and out of place. In the movie, we get a very good sense of how troubled she is by her curse and her birthright, but the only real insight we get as to how she feels as a teenage girl is via her love for Ethan.
A major split between the book and film is the removal of Ethan and Lena’s telepathy. I’m of mixed opinion on this: on the one hand, it did a lot to hammer in the point that there was an unusual connection between Ethan and Lena. On the other hand, I found it jarring how casually Ethan dealt with the fact that he had a telepathic connection with somebody. It even pushed me into reconsidering the genre of the novel: was this paranormal YA? Or the elusive genre of YA magical realism? In any case, it’s not hard to see why it was removed from the film, as mind-to-mind communication is always difficult to effectively convey.
Book adaptations are always tricky; most fans are not going to be happy with any deviations from the book, even though they are usually necessary when translating between media. I think that Beautiful Creatures did a remarkable job of capturing its intended spirit onscreen, and will be waiting for news on a sequel.
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