From Font to Film with Flannery and Feagles

Last semester I took a class taught by Michele Lettiere called From Font to Film (shout out to Abdi who took it as well). As the title suggests, we studied numerous works of literature which were then turned into movies and watched to see how the plot line and characters were altered in order to create a more comprehensible, and often more concise, story. Even though The Displaced Person was not a novel itself, that does not mean that it cannot follow the same guidelines upon which other longer stories are assessed when turned into film. Even Brokeback Mountain, a movie of 134 minutes, was once only a short story of about 40 pages (completely guessing here because I can't find my handout, but that should be proof enough because it was only a handout). When watching The Displaced Person, I couldn't help but notice that it hardly left the story's dialogue or timeline whatsoever. Normally when I watch the movie-version of a book that I have read, I am thoroughly disappointed and often outraged at the way the director chose to portray one of the characters or that they decided to leave out one of my favorite scenes, so I thought that I would be pleased to have finally seen a film whose visual matched directly with the text. But this was not the case. I loved the story, but the film somehow bored me. Was it because I knew everything that was going to happen? Was it because I didn't like Mrs. Shortley in the book, so I obviously wasn't going to like her in the film? I still can't place my finger precisely on the reason that I just did not enjoy the film all that much. What do you guys think? Did you like the film? Would additional scenes have helped? Maybe more/fewer characters? Whatever the reason may be, I still enjoyed the entirety of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and will deal with a little disappointment regardless.