How Faithful Is the New Rebecca Movie to the Book by Daphne du Maurier?

The newest adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, which arrives on Netflix on Wednesday, follows the book’s unnamed female narrator—identified in the movie credits only as Mrs. de Winter, her married name—as she meets and weds a wealthy widower in Monte Carlo. Maxim de Winter In the film, the male romantic lead is played by Armie Hammer, who’s extremely handsome in a standard-issue hunk kind of a way, which is very different from how the narrator describes Maxim in the book: “He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. When the two first have lunch together, the narrator describes him as having a “quality of detachment.” As readers, we come to believe that de Winter’s motivations are suspect: He is, like many romantic heroes, powerful, inscrutable, and intensely attractive, but maybe not exactly good—a combination of qualities that, as Laura Miller points out in her review of the new movie for Slate, the more conventionally good-looking Hammer struggles to convey. The new Mrs. de Winter senses that the servants dislike her, thinking, after meeting Mrs. Danvers, that the housekeeper “despised me, marking with all the snobbery of her class that I was no great lady, that I was humble, shy, and diffident.” The narrator of the novel also notices, for example, the “magnificence” of the breakfasts at Manderley, describing the spread the servants provide for her and Maxim as “enough for a dozen people.” She muses on how odd it is that Maxim has eaten this way for years, “seeing nothing ridiculous about it, nothing wasteful.” But by the end of the novel, the narrator has come to terms with the great expenditure of resources she sees around her at the estate, even adding to it by ordering that the staff provide the couple with something new to eat at a given meal, rather than re-serving leftovers from a recent party. When Maxim says to her, near the end of the film and novel, “You’ve lost that funny lost look you had,” he’s mourning her loss of innocence.