I only watched a few bits on the plane. My feeling was that either the director needed to go very David Lynch and take it to somewhere completely unreal, or else they needed to move away from the source, because it felt very like the book and highlighted how reading something is very different from seeing it performed. What I saw of Nicole Kidman’s performance was good but just out of place because the rest of the film didn’t seem as committed to how unreal and ridiculous her character was.
(I watched a bit of the start of Where’d You Go Bernadette and got exactly the same feeling of failing to recognise the source wouldn’t translate directly, although in that film’s case they should probably have gone for a much broader comedy or something.)
