I listened to this book over the summer, and I’ve been meaning to watch the movie for a while, just getting around to it but I’ve gotta do it in chunks. I really enjoyed the book and the narrator, Ron McLarty, who grew on me quite a bit after a slightly rocky start (but I think that’s me more than him, because I’d just come off The Sorcerer’s House, and I think switching from one narrator to another is always a weird feeling for me).
Half an hour into the movie, though, oh boy, does the dialogue that sounded fine coming from McLarty, who sounds most of the time like a doped up surfer himself, sound exceptionally stilted coming from actors. Like, it’s kind of painful to listen to, except for Brolin, maybe, and Phoenix at times. Most of them just play the absurdist dialogue too straight, trying to seem like real people saying real things, when the things they’re saying are not things that real people would ever say.
The banana scene, which I don’t recall from the book, was indeed great; Phoenix’s face is eloquent. I do not like Joanna Newsom as the narrator at all; her voice is just too smarmy. Powering through it, but right now it’s falling much, much flatter than the book did for me, which I did not expect and am very disappointed by.