For readers, every book experience is like the best movie they've ever seen, and a great book, re-read at different times within ones' life becomes a new movie, because as we age, we see different things in the text that we could not have experienced previously. It is said that no two persons every read the same book, because you, the reader, are an active participant to the process. By directly engaging the content, you create and act out all of the parts of a story, in a way that a movie cannot ever hope to do.
Much as I love Sean Connery, the film version cannot possibly capture the subtleties of Eco's various story lines, all the variations and sophistications which weave the fabric of his fable together. The movie must choose one storyline, or else loose its audience within its given time frame. The movie director chose the most obvious and easily understandable aspect of Eco's book, which is the murder mystery.
But there are so many aspects woven into the book which cannot be rendered accurately in film-form. A director tells you the point of view, and you are a captive audience. A book, read expertly, becomes the most incredible movie you've ever seen, because you have an active hand in its creation through your own inner self. Nothing trumps the richness of the human imagination. The film becomes a shadow, a derivative and lesser product from the source which it has sprung.
Umberto Eco gives us history, art, illuminators, medieval life, the mysteries of faith, a murder plot, the hierarchy of church leadership, the hypocrisies of organized religion, the divine strangeness of the supernatural, the inner workings of an abbey and a scriptorium, the brutalization of the burning of books as a political weapon by destroying certain human histories, plus whatever else you can derive from his work.
So top that. But you won't. An neither will I. Because it's a masterpiece.
