Books vs. Movies: “Me Before You”
“Me Before You” by Jojo Moyes is a book about finding love in unexpected places. The main characters, Will and Louisa, couldn’t live any different of lives. 27 year old Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl with an unordinary fashion sense. While living with her parents, and holding a steady boyfriend, she see’s herself in a quite enjoyable life until one day her long lasting job at the “Buttered Bun” closes down, making her unemployed. While job searching she finds the job of being a caretaker for a quadriplegic, and this is where Will comes in. Will Traynor is the “king of the world” holding a very well paying job, and traveling he world coming back to his beautiful girlfriend each time. But one day Will gets into an accident leaving him as the one who needs to be taken care of. This book is hopeful yet heartbreaking, and very surprising. Get caught up in Jojo Moyes’s astounding book, “Me Before You”.
— Before you read on know that there WILL be spoilers! —
“Me Before You” is a very well written book, but when it was put into a movie a lot of major points were left out. The first one(s) is that the movie never mentioned anyone’s background(besides Will’s). For example the only thing we know about Louisa, the main character, from the movie is that she wears some “fun” clothes and that she is very talkative. Yet, her background shows a lot more of her than the movie portrayed. Louisa, in the book, used to be this big party girl. She went to bars, snuck out with guys, and you would not be able to know all of that from simply watching the movie. One night Louisa got drunk, and very bad things happened to her because of that. This was a major changing point in her life and it made her who she now is.
My second example is between both Patrick and Louisa. All we knew about Patrick, from the movie, was that he was this very fit “running man”, but in the book, his background is told as someone Louisa thought would “never hurt her”(pg. 89). Louisa described Patrick as “ordinary-looking rather than handsome”, and she said that “his burn was podgier than mine, but I liked it”(pg. 88). From only watching the movie I would’ve never thought that Patrick was ever anything less than his fit, running obsessed, self.
Later on in the book Louisa somewhat gets “kicked out” of her house which leads the Patrick offering up his home, but in 7 years of dating neither of them had ever considered moving in with each other. (they do end up moving in with each other, which adds to he list of untold points in the movie) One night towards the end of the book Patrick surprises Louisa with a semi-nice dinner(that still fits into his diet), and he apologizes, {Patrick had recently gotten very worried about Louisa’s job with Will. He was afraid that things could happen and a relationship would come of it, and Louisa got mad at him for it. Louisa was mad that he thought she would cheat. She was mad that he thought she would leave him or worse, but the worst thing is that Patrick wanted her to take the job, so why would he be cautious now?} but this apology wasn’t sincere. Later on in the night they get into a very big argument about
- ) her not going to his “big race”, and
- ) her going on an overseas trip with Will instead.
Patrick couldn’t comprehend that Louisa was doing this for Will’s own good and so she left him, and this was a MAJOR point that was left out of the movie(this also led to other thing that were left out, but I’m not going to go into that much detail).
In conclusion, I discovered that MANY things were left out of “Me Before You’s” movie, but I would still highly recommend reading this book if you are into “drama/romance” books.
