When adapting a well-known and loved play into a movie, the adaptor must keep in mind how the audience will react to a new version of a beloved story. An example of this is A Raisin in the Sun, which was adapted into a movie in 2008. Lorraine Hansberry wrote the original play and Paris Qualles adapted that play into a TV movie. The main themes of the story are family, faith, and hope.
Following the narrative of a lower-class family living in Chicago in 1959, the play deals with racial tension, family issues, the journey from childhood to adulthood, and how each individual person impacts others around them, within the family unit and out in the world. Some minor issues with the play were resolved in the movie, such as the role of women and how they did not seem to have lives outside of the apartment. The 2008 movie adaptation stayed true to the original framework of the play while enriching the story for a modern audience.
One of the major changes from the play to the movie is that both Mama and Ruth are given more agency; they have more power and aren’t just trapped in the house all the time. A major example of this is when Ruth goes to get the abortion. There are several extra scenes that are just devoted to her and that gives her more of a backstory instead of being onedimensional. When she goes to get an abortion consultation in the movie, she is obviously scared, but she stays strong and then goes home, where she pretends like nothing happened.
In the play, she mentions going to the doctor, but the audience never sees that happen. As she starts to tell Mama about the abortion, she starts crying, which shows how she can be simultaneously strong and vulnerable; in the play this does not happen. When she has scenes with the family, she is given more lines, and in turn, a stronger voice. For example, in the play, Mama is talking about the relationship between her and her kids and she says, “No- there’s something that come down between me and them that don’t let us understand each other and I don’t know what it is. (page 52)
In the movie, that line is given to Ruth instead of Mama. This quote is important to the overall story because it emphasizes the tension between Mama and her kids, and by giving that line to Ruth, Qualles is giving her more power in that scene. When Walter is out drinking and Ms. Arnold, his employer, calls to say that he hasn’t been showing up for work, Mama goes to pick Walter up from the bar instead of just waiting for him to come home. This not only shows Walter’s emotional detachment from the rest of the family and makes it more dramatic for Mama, it gives her more power in the scene.
She is the one ‘leading’ the scene, not Walter. Qualles made these choices to modernize the movie, because in 1959. female characters were often one-dimensional and shallow. Since the movie was made in 2008, however, the screenwriters could make the women’s roles deeper and give them more agency onscreen. The target audience for this movie is families, and since many parents want their kids to see movies with strong characters in all genders, by making the movie a bit more feminist, they are satisfying the target audience.
These changes do not negatively affect the rest of the play; they improve it, because Ruth and Mama are important characters and should be given better lines and subplots. In the play, every scene takes place in the apartment, so the audience never sees what the character’s lives are like outside of their home. In the movie, however, each character has at least one scene outside of the apartment. Walter goes to work and to the bar, Travis is outside playing and getting the mail, Ruth goes for an abortion consultation, Mama goes to work and the market, and Beneatha is shown at college.
In the play, these scenes are merely described in a few sentences or not even mentioned at all. Qualles made these choices to give the story more context and to give each character more of a backstory. If the audience can understand what each character’s life is like when they are separate from the rest of the family, then they can understand and even identify with each individual character more and see their perspective. Especially with Walter, showing him apart from the rest of his family and letting the audience see different aspects of his life, these additional details enrich each character.
The audience sees how Walter goes to work every day for a rich white man; they see how he is treated like he doesn’t deserve dreams. This makes the viewer empathize with him. The audience also gets to see Mama go to work every day as well. She works as a nanny for a family with a little girl, and the viewer gets to see the connection and relationship between her and the child. Then, the audience can understand why she is a little sad to be retiring.
Qualles knew that the storyline is richer when more information is given, and that this does not negatively affect the overarching message that Lorraine Hansberry created. In the movie, Beneatha and Walter are meaner to each other than they are in the book, creating more tension and making the audience side with one character. When they are fighting, they are not just arguing; they are literally shouting in each other’s faces, and during one scene, it seems like they might actually start hitting each other.
At the end of one fight, Ruth asks Beneatha why she picks fights with Walter and Beneatha replies, “it’s just fun! “, which makes her seem immature. This fits with their character types; they both act childlike and detached. Even when they are just saying a few lines to each other in passing, one of them will inevitably say some little microaggression to annoy the other. Qualles did this to accentuate the tension between Walter and Beneatha, but it is distracting and even annoying at times. There can still be tension between them if they are slightly amiable towards each other.
Lorraine Hansberry didn’t write them to be aggressively and constantly fighting, she just wrote them to have normal sibling rivalry, even though they are too old for that. While Beneatha and Walter are supposed to have a rift between them, their storyline should not overpower the rest of the story. Overall, Qualles made the right choices when adapting A Raisin in the Sun into a modern movie. He made each character more three-dimensional, gave context to certain scenes, and gave agency to the female characters.
Elements of Beneatha and Walter’s relationship, such as their sibling dynamic, were given a little too much attention, but that isn’t distracting until it overpowers the rest of the storyline. The other two main changes added to the story and enhanced the characters so that they seemed more relatable to the audience. Even though a few scenes were removed, those scenes were not essential to the play as a whole; they only added to specific parts of the story. The movie as a whole stayed true to the framework of the play while enriching the story for a modern audience.