Yeah, Reisz's film suffers from truncation, and so Sarah's mystery is lost; but I found the contemporary adaptation within the film a cool concept, and an acknowledgement in itself of the difficulty of adaptation (not only in script, but in interpreting and tuning actor performances). (It was scripted by Harold Pinter, who's no stranger to writing for actors.) The film's dual endings, one in the fiction and one outside, was clever too.

Streep's good as the actress having to play the eternal mystery, Sarah Woodruff, though as Fowles's fictional character herself she's a bit one-dimensional(... or is she? Note that at one point in the novel Fowles himself asks, "Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?" and then begins the next chapter (13), with "I do not know", and goes on to intrude upon his own narrative and dedicate a fair chunk to the notions of literary imagination).

Love the novel, though; I'd rank Fowles's top three as The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Collector. All three have been adapted into films, of course. The Magus is far too short to be as rich as the novel, though Fowles's own script does well in securing the bare essentials: Michael Caine's a bit wooden, though, and Anthony Quinn's not my ideal Conchis. I'd love to see William Wyler's The Collector, though it's hard to find over here. Wyler's a fine director (he was nominated for more Oscars than any other director), and the novel, unlike The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, is digestible enough in size and thematic fabric to merit a feature film.

If anybody would ever like to get the gist of my single philosophical outlook on life, check out Fowles's The Aristos.