Hotel New Hampshire: Movie Analysis

The Hotel New Hampshire’s movie adaptation followed to book rather closely, especially when compared to The World According to Garp adaptation. Despite the admirable job done converting the book into a movie, there are some themes present in the book that do not seem to carry over quite as well as the characters themselves do. Maturation is the focus of The Hotel New Hampshire, but that focus is acquired through interaction with people and events. Death, sex and the idea of love, whether sexual and/or familial, were involved in the maturation of both John and the Hotel New Hampshire in the novel. However the movie is limited in what it can home in on. There is limited time in the movie, and a visual adaptation does not always lend itself to displaying personal contemplations of a character for the entire feature. …show more content…
Granted people still died, but it did not seem to impact the characters quite as heavily as the deaths in the novel did. As the film showed the wreckage of Egg and the mother’s plane there was a voice over of the iconic line of, “Sorrow floats”. And that single line is the second to last time the movie mentions dear Sorrow, either the dog or what he stands for. The very last time sorrow is mentioned John and Win Berry are outside the Viennese Opera, and John in contemplating Franny. It is then that he decides that both sorrow and love float. The bomb happens, and the family flies back to America. Lily commits suicide. At this point in the book the phrase, “Sorrow floats” is worked into nearly every chapter opening, middle and ending. Yet the movie simply never mentions Sorrow after Vienna, almost as if he was left floating over