Flowers for Algernon or pulling a real Charly Gordon

Flowers for Algernon was written by Daniel Keyes as a short story in 1959 and then expanded to novel
length in 1966. It was adapted to film in 1968, it was adapted again in 2000 as a TV movie.
I'll be covering the TV movie and the Film Adaptation and also on a future episode of Take Me to Your
Reader.

Firstly will start with the plot of the story. Charly Gordon is a 37yr old man with an IQ of 68 who works at
a Bakery during the day and goes to School at night to learn to read and write. His teacher, Ms Alice
Kinian gets him the opportunity to be a human test subject for an experiment that would increase his
intelligence as they have for a small white mouse named Algernon.

Keyes writes Flowers for Algernon through Progress Reports that Charlie writes, so that the narrative is
from Charly's point of view. At first glance Keyes' writing seems almost condescending but by the end of
the first third of the story, you realise all the effort that he must have put into writing the earlier parts. The
spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are so well thought out that the gradual improvements in Charly's
writing are as surprising to the reader as they are to the character.
The main difference between the short story and the novel are the addition of a couple of subplots. One
involves Charly's sexual exploration and maturation. Which is interesting in the framing of it as almost a like
second puberty, even down to things moving at an accelerated pace and with the ease of growing intellect
to learn from his missteps.
The other is to do with Charly's family, his father, mother and sister as well as the circumstances of how
Charly ended up in the situation that we meet him with at the beginning of the novel. The second subplot is
the more interesting of the two as we learn that Charly's mother was pushing Charly to one treatment or
another to make him normal and as soon as she knew his sister had normal IQ that he was rejected and
pushed aside by his mother, his father being the only person being concerned for Charly's well being.
This turns a different path when he locates his father and gets a haircut from him in his barber's shop. Even
though he is successful and what he deems normal, he can't bring himself to introduce himself to his father
who defended him all those times as a child. This is made even more tragic when he finally tracks down his
mother and his sister (who had signed the release for his operation) and finds his mother in the early stages
of dementia and his sister caring for her. The cruellest irony is that his sister while attempting to salvage her
relationship with her brother, doesn't realise that Charly knows that he is in decline and that the person that
she believes that he is now, will soon no longer exist. Charly leaves his newly found family and starts to plan
for his impending decline. And gradually one by one he pushes away everyone that matter to him, until he
eventually ends up in the home that he has organised to be put into.

So with any adaptation stuff is going to be left out but Charly/Flowers For Algernon is a good example of
being too faithful an adaptation is almost as bad as being not paying homage to the original source of the
story. Good place to start with this is the plot line which is largely missing from both adaptations, the family
dynamic as they deal with Charly. The tv adaptation focuses more on a minor incident in Charly's past that
forced the changing of schools and started causing the rift between him and his sister and the Film
Adaptation glosses over it completely. This is a missed opportunity because it could have been conveyed in
the visual medium, Charly and his mother interacting together as they both longed for before they both take
their parallel paths blissful ignorance. The TV movie is a more close adaption of the novel but I as previously
stated it does not make it better. While the movie is not as close an adaptation it at least treats the
characters in a three dimensional way. To me this comes down to two factors, the first being that the late
Cliff Robertson passion for the projector. He pushed for the film Charly to be made since he had already
played Charly Gordon on television seven years prior. Robertson believed in the project so much that he
paid William Goldman, writer of the Princess Bride, thirty thousand dollars to adapt it out of his own pocket.
Unhappy with Goldman's draft, he then got Stirling Sliphant write whose screenplay was the one that was
ultimately shot. Although the Charly is a product of its time (the late sixties) mainly through the use of split
screen and the counterculture of the time, the way the Director shot the film in a very cinema verite style
allows the story to be very accessible. The one scene that does change completely from the novel is when
Charly is at the bar and the young man who it is implied has the same mental acquity as Charly once had,
drops the glasses and all the patrons laugh at him. In the novel, Charly attempts to chastise the patrons for
their behaviour which does appear to have a negligible effect. The film deals with this in a more profound
way with Cliff Robertson's performance. Charly doesn’t say a single word. His silent dignity and empathy to
simply help reduces the room to silence. In effect, his actions lead the room to reflect on their own guilt and
culpability in the way that they had treated the young man minutes earlier. While the film doesn't cover
Charly's deterioration in much detail like the short story and omits the bittersweet title drop in the final lines
of both the short story and the novel. But in doing so it evades a pitfall that the TV Movie heads directly into.
In comparison the TV Movie is almost slavishly adapting the book which isn't necessarily a good thing. It
would be a good companion piece if one was teaching this text, but the screenplay isn't really updated for
the time it was shot in 2000. While it has some shots of computers being used, it could be from anytime
which is a shame. The one thing that the TV Movie does get right like the Film Adaptation is the use of
clothing and hairstyling to subtly show Charly's rise and decline without having to resort to exposition.
Unfortunately while getting a lot of the text right, it makes a large change towards the end. Gone are the
characters of Charly's Father and Mother and the subplot of his mother's dementia which to me is a shame.
The other change is the ending, where the Charly Gordon in the novel makes great pains to spare Alice
Kinian from seeing his decline as does the movie Charly Gordon where as the TV movie version, makes
great professions of his love for Alice Kinian but then proceeds to make no changes in the face of his
deterioration, he gets his job back at the bakery and back into Alice Kinian's class with only a passing
statement to the home that he will be moving into. This is the bit that just seems cruel from Alice Kinian's
perspective, to have to see the man that she loved every single day and for him not to recognise her or
remember their love would be torture in my opinion. While it is utilised as a way for Charly to ask Alice to put
flowers on Algernon's grave, it could have been in the scene prior and conveyed that much better. On the
whole I found the short story and novel extremely well written and thought out.
The movie and the TV movie are good companion pieces to the novel if only to show the difference
between adapting too close to the material and also leaving something out and also when something should
have been left in. It is also a very thought provoking story as well, delving into ideas such as treatment of the
intellectually disabled, how intelligence can be linked to identity and the differences between emotional
intellect and pure intellect are. It comes highly recommended.