Simon Birch
“Pretty vague job description, isn’t it?” These lines of dialogue are a spoken between the lead character, Simon Birch, and Ben Goodrich, who is played by Oliver Platt. This proclamation sums up the driving force behind Simon’s actions. His quest to be a hero is Simon Birch’s ‘maguffin’. It is the thing that drives him forward through the film. Throughout the film he is constantly in search of a sign from god that will tell him when the time has come for him to be a hero. This most recent adaptation of a John Irving novel, “A Prayer for Owen Meany”, is filmmaker Mark Johnson’s Simon Birch. What needs to be understood by the viewer is that the movie is an adaptation and not the book. Reviewers repeatedly said that the movie was not like the book and the reason for that is it is not the book. This seems to be something that critics lost sight of, the movie was judged against the book and not for its artistic merit. Although the film “…premiered to cheers from the audience…”(17.), most critics seem to agree that there was no justice done to the Irving novel. Variety said that Simon Birch yet again showed that, “capturing Irving’s mercurial tonal shifts in another medium is not so easy.”
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1719
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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