book vs. movie

I don't know what everyone else thinks, but to me, visualizing Dylan as one person is much easier in the book than the movie.  Maybe the dramatized lives of each of the characters in the movie create that disconnect because their stories are so extreme yet so different.  

The movie clearly had some fictional parts to it (ostrich and giraffe in the Halloween town, Dylan floating in the air while leashed to the ground) which both confused me and enriched the Dylan lore.  Dylan admits to lying about and embellishing his past in Chronicles, but the book doesn't seem to contain anything too farfetched.  Does Dylan just cleverly hide the fictional aspects of the book?  Or is most of the book fictional and I am just overlooking it?  After all, he speaks in detail about every acquaintance, place he's performed, etc. over 40 years later.  

When contemplating the movie I continue to question why Jack Rollins evolves into Pastor John when no other characters go through such a metamorphosis.  Is Dylan saying that the introduction to religion changed him more than anything else in his life?  I keep asking myself what all the images, subtleties, and allusions mean, and I feel like that is exactly the question Dylan and Todd Haynes were trying to conjure out of the audience.