I’m almost always on Team Book. I’m a writer and a librarian. I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by books, and I’m one of those people who will happily tell you that the book was better. Except when it wasn’t. And for me, one of the rare exceptions is Practical Magic.
When the Movie Is Better Than the Book
I love Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series. I’ve read all four books about the Owens family—Practical Magic, The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic—and I love the strange, beautiful world Hoffman created around generations of Owens women, their complicated relationships, and the magic and consequences that follow them.
But as much as I love the books, I love the 1998 movie Practical Magic even more than the original novel it was based on. And with Practical Magic 2 arriving in theaters this week, I’ve been thinking about why. Whenever a beloved novel is adapted for film, readers immediately notice what’s missing. A character disappears. Two characters become one. A subplot gets cut. Events happen in a different order. Sometimes an ending changes completely.
As a reader, those changes can be infuriating. But as a writer, I understand them.
A novel has room to wander through a character’s thoughts, history, memories, and relationships. A movie has roughly two hours to make us understand and care about an entire world. So a good adaptation isn’t necessarily a faithful transcription of a book. It’s a translation. And occasionally, during that translation, something unexpected happens. The story becomes something slightly different… and that different story works.
That’s what happened for me with Practical Magic. The movie kept the heart of Alice Hoffman’s story but created its own distinctive world around Sally and Gillian Owens, played by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.
And then there were Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet. Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest turned the Owens aunts into characters I could happily watch make breakfast, tend herbs, dispense questionable advice, and interfere in everyone’s lives. The house became a character of its own. So did the garden. The candles, the herbs, the family traditions, the small New England town, and—of course—the midnight margaritas all created an atmosphere that somehow felt larger than the individual scenes. It became a place I wanted to visit.
That’s something movies can sometimes do better than books. A novel asks us to create a world inside our own imaginations. A film gives that world color, sound, music, movement, clothing, rooms, gardens, and faces. When all of those elements come together perfectly, they can create something unforgettable.
There’s also something a novelist can’t completely control in a film adaptation: chemistry. On the page, a writer creates relationships through dialogue, action, internal thoughts, and all the tiny details that reveal how characters feel about one another. On screen, sometimes two actors simply click.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman made Sally and Gillian feel like sisters to me. Not perfect sisters. Not sisters who always understood each other or made sensible decisions. But sisters who could irritate each other, disappoint each other, rescue each other, and still belong to one another.
The same thing happened with the entire group of Owens women. Their relationships gave the movie warmth beneath all the curses, ghosts, murder, romance, and magic. For me, that’s the real heart of Practical Magic. It’s not actually the magic. It’s the women. Maybe that’s why we occasionally love a movie more than the book that inspired it. It doesn’t necessarily mean the filmmakers told the story better. Sometimes they simply found a different heart inside the same story.
The novel and the movie become related works rather than competing versions. One gives us the author’s original world. The other takes that world and filters it through actors, screenwriters, directors, costume designers, composers, set designers, and dozens of other artists. Most of the time, I’ll still choose the book.
Interestingly, Practical Magic wasn’t a big success when it first arrived in theaters in 1998. Reviews were mixed, and the movie earned only modestly more at the worldwide box office than its reported production budget. It was very different from the beloved hit we think of today. But over the years, something changed. People kept watching it, sharing it, and returning to it every autumn until Practical Magic became a genuine cult classic. I love that part of its history almost as much as I love the movie itself. Sometimes a story simply needs time to find the people who will love it.
And when autumn arrives and I start thinking about old houses and gardens filled with herbs, the Owens women I see in my imagination are Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, and Dianne Wiest. And honestly? I can almost hear the blender making midnight margaritas. Now I’m just hoping Practical Magic 2 can cast the same spell.
