About a Boy

Chris Weitz and his brother Paul cut the two most visible cords between Nick Hornby’s novel and their film. The book is set in London in 1993 and turns on the death of Kurt Cobain. The adaptation drops every Nirvana reference and has Will hand the boy rap records instead. The talent show that closes the film is not the book’s ending either. The reason Will has never worked is stated outright: royalties from a Christmas song his father wrote. The narration is doubled, so both Will and Marcus think out loud, and each of them keeps misreading the other. Badly Drawn Boy wrote the entire score. The one exception is Killing Me Softly with His Song, which the plot itself uses. Hornby said the directors floated that name in one of their earliest conversations and that the coincidence struck him as eerie. The film opened the first Tribeca Festival in New York in 2002. At the 2003 ceremony the screenplay was its only Academy Award nomination, in Writing (Adapted Screenplay); The Pianist won. BAFTA nominated both the script and Toni Collette. A good fit if you want Fiona’s depression left unsoftened while the comedy keeps working around it. Not for anyone who cannot take a suicide attempt arriving in the first half hour with the tone unchanged.