About a Boy (based on a book by Nick Hornby)- Isaac Richter

In the summer of 2002, one of the films I was eagerly anticipating was the Hugh Grant comedy About a Boy. I remember I went to Canada for the summer and when I walked into a bookstore, I found the novel version to "About a Boy". I hadn't seen the film yet, and having just gone through the book/film experience of the first Harry Potter book, I wanted to try something else. I bought the book, and devoured it in two days (partly due to the fact that one of those days was a very long plane ride). I loved the book, and could not wait to see the movie, which was already playing at my home. It was the first film I saw by myself in the theaters (and saw it later with my mom, who read the book after I did).
The story has two protagonists. One is a 36-year-old man named Will who lives alone, out of the royalties of a song his father wrote, watching TV, sleeping with women and avoiding any kind of responsibility. The other is 12-year-old Marcus, a kid with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He gets beat up at school every day, and he has to come home to his mother crying. Even though the book is written with a third-person omniscient narrator, each chapter switches protagonist. Hornby's first chapter is on Marcus, and the second is on Will, and it alternates like that throughout. The film employs a similar technique, except that in the film, the characters narrate the story. In the first scene of the film, Will describes his life in his apartment in voice-over. He describes his life as an island, and how now it;s the time to be an island. In the next scene we meet Marcus, and hear his voice in voice-over. He describes himself as an unhappy kid who just didn't fit. These narrations continue throughout the film, taking us into each character's thoughts, and the conflicting narrations when the characters are together provides humor. For example, there's a scene where Will takes Marcus and his mom out to dinner. Marcus thinks he can set his mom and Will up on a date, and in his voice-over, he compliments what his mom is wearing. But then we hear Will saying that Marcus' mom is in a yeti costume.
The plot is set in motion by the fact that Will discovers single mothers as a great dating tool, so he joins a Single Parents support group and poses as a single father in order to meet women. He meets Marcus on a picnic with one of these single mothers. Marcus's mom, Fiona, was sick and unable to go, so Marcus was taken by Susie. Two very unfortunate things happen that day that regardless make Marcus chase after Will for a father figure. One, he accidentally kills a duck by throwing a heavy loaf of bread in the water, and the other is that his mother attempts suicide (unsuccessfully). Because of these things going on, Marcus goes after Will, even after he discovers that he's not actually a single father.
The first two acts of the film follow the book pretty faithfully. The way Will comes into Marcus's life, the Dead Duck Day, the Christmas Party, and Will meeting a woman named Rachel and actually wanting for the first time to have a serious relationship, but he pawns Marcus off as his son to get her interested in him. When Will admits to Rachel that Marcus is not actually his son, that's where the film starts to deviate from the book. In the book, Rachel is actually way more understanding than in the film, and she instead arranges to meet with him and Fiona. In the film, on the other hand, he walks away from Rachel admitting he's blank, and the third act turns into a school rock concert that is not in the book, but it works, because it completes the character archs of these characters into a very satisfying movie.
One hint that should've told me from the get-go that the ending was going to be radically different is that the film is set in 2002 (the year the film was released), while the book is set in 1993, and into 1994. In the book, Marcus's relationship with Ellie, the older girl that practically adopts him at school (and he has a major crush on). In the book, she's very into Nirvana. She accompanies Marcus to meet his dad one day, but they stop at an earlier station and Ellie takes Marcus to a music store where she smashes a poster of Kurt Cobain, because she feels they're profiting from his suicide. They get arrested and Will and Fiona have to pick them up. Kurt Cobain's suicide is not an event that can be moved up to 2002, so that ending to the book could not work in the movie.
On the other hand, there are plenty of hilarious details in the film that are taken directly from the book. Will swearing after Marcus tells him he is sometimes worried his mom will commit suicide again is in the book, Fiona repeating everything Marcus says and turning it into a question when Marcus tells her about visiting Will, Will breaking up a fight between Marcus and Fiona by telling her about the Dead Duck Day, and even Rachel's psycho son Ali and that line "She's not keen on him! She's only Keen on me!" That line is straight from the book. Other details are updated. In the book, Marcus thinks if he were like Macaulay Culkin, he could pay his mom to teach him at home. In the film they change it to Haley Joel Osment. In the book, Will gives Marcus a Nirvana CD for Christmas. In the movie it's Mystikal (a hip hop band). The units of time speech, the Will show speech, and the inclusion of Killing Me Softly are all by the Weitz brothers (who directed and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie).
When it comes to adaptations, the most annoying thing to find is die-hard fans of the source material who hate the adaptation just because it's not the source material. That's because it's not the source material, and the source material still exists, it can still be viewed or read, no one will stop people from getting the original novel or the original film. That doesn't mean the adaptation doesn't have its merits. Paul and Chris Weitz's version of About a Boy is not like the film. The exclusion of any mention of Nirvana might be a disappointment to many fans (because the title is a pun to the Nirvana song "About a Girl"), but it's a really good movie on its own. It's a coming-of-age story that examines the character archs of two characters who are either too young or too old for their ages, and how through each other, they learn how to take life more seriously, but not too seriously. The rock concert is a more humorous approach to the culmination of these archs, but it works. It works, because Marcus wants to make is mom happy all along, and even if he can't get someone else to help him, he helps her, and Will learns that Marcus means something to him, so he helps Marcus at the rock concert to give his own life meaning as well. Both the book and the movie work, even if they do defer, they have the same spirit and the characters are present and alive in both versions of the story.