So I Just Started Reading The Devil All The Time And One Thing I Really Admired About The Movie Adaptation

So I just started reading The Devil All The Time and one thing I really admired about the movie adaptation was the way they re-did the introduction of Willard’s wife, Charlotte.

In the book, she’s described as the most beautiful woman Willard has ever seen, with dark hair and the look of a pin-up girl in a movie. That’s his whole reason for marrying her: she’s beautiful and sexy.

Portrayed by Haley Bennet in the film, though, Charlotte has light hair and a very cherubic fresh face. She isn’t styled to look like the most beautiful girl in the world. She’s not even the styled as the most beautiful girl in the diner. Yet, Willard obviously sees something in her that compels him, and then when he follows her outside, he catches her in an act of kindness and his heart is stolen.

Can we just stop for a moment to recognize how rare this kind of adaptation is in Hollywood films, where most nuanced female characters in novels are  flattened into one-dimensional sex sirens on film? Here we see nearly the exact opposite.