December 31, 2015
Middlemarch – UK
Screenwriters have made a career of
whittling down three hundred page books into neat, compact 120-page
screenplays. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it provides
viewers with tight schedules or insufficient time a way to view a work of
fiction in a short time, yet it is a process that is unlikely to please
everyone. Inevitably, the decision to excise a particular scene or character will
ruffle the feathers of the book’s die-hard fans, who often insist that what was
taken out was of vital importance to the narrative or was their favorite part
of the book. Yet extracting scenes and characters is often a necessary evil.
After all, it is said that it takes one minute to depict a single page of a
novel, and some books are much longer than others. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is such a book. The novel
has over nine hundred pages, meaning a faithful screen adaptation would be more
than fifteen hours long. However, the 1994 Masterpiece Theatre miniseries Middlemarch clocks in at 375 minutes. Clearly
some things had to go.
Middlemarch
tells the story of a time, a place, and a group of
people. It is set in the 1830s in a fictitious town in midland England
The BBC miniseries primarily focuses on
three aspects of Eliot’s masterpiece: Dorothea Brooke’s ill-fated marriage to
the Reverend Edward Casaubon, Dr. Tirtius Lydgate and his relationship with
Rosamond Vincy, and Fred Vincy’s love for Mary Garth. Other characters come and
go, but much less time is spent on them. This is to the detriment of the series,
for without the backgrounds that Eliot took such pains to establish in the
first half of the book, many of the actions that happen in the latter half of
the series lack the power or connection that they might otherwise have had.
For example, little time is devoted to
establishing Bulstrode’s fragile connections with the community or to his
personal conflicts; Lydgate’s friendship with Vicar Camden Fairbrother is
poorly established; and Caleb Garth is all but ignored for the first half of
the series. The series also so greatly reduces the roles of Dorothea’s sister,
Cecilia, and her husband, Sir James Chettam, that I couldn’t help wondering if
it might have been better to remove them from the story altogether. Other
characters stand in the background for most of the series only suddenly to be
thrust the foreground as trusted confidants or dispensers of old-fashioned,
class-based theories about women and the kind of people they should strive to
marry. Such moments worked in the book. Here, people may not even remember who
the characters are.
The good news is that the miniseries does
many things well. It more than adequately establishes Dorothea’s initial
interest in Casaubon and the tragedy that follows. True to the book, it
presents Casaubon as a flawed, but sympathetic man who should never have gotten
married in the first place. This is a character who is not only socially
awkward but lacks the ability to follow through on his life’s work, and a scene
in which Dorothea holds her husband’s lifeless hand while resting her head on
his should is quite moving. The series also devotes the right amount of time to
Lydgate and Rosamond, and we clearly see the promise of their relationship,
which makes its demise all the more difficult to witness. Alas, this leaves
scant time for Fred and Mary’s tale, and fans of that part of the book will
undoubtedly feel shortchanged.
The cast of Middlemarch is excellent throughout the film. Juliet Audrey
perfectly captures Dorothea’s youthful naïveté and her later devotion to
goodness and decency, and Patrick Malahide shines as Casaubon, a role that
could easily have been played as monstrous and cold. Malahide finds the
humanity in the character, while simultaneously revealing his moral weakness.
It’s a truly heartbreaking performance. Douglas Hodge and Rufus Sewell are also
excellent as Lydgate and Casaubon’s cousin, Will Ladislaw. Unfortunately, the
supporting cast is undercut by the decision to remove much of their character’s
backstories, After all, for a revelation such as Bulstrode’s to be truly
shocking, time must be devoted to establishing his complicated personality.
Here it isn’t, rendering his second act something we witness, but do not feel.
The same could be said for many of the other characters, in particular, Mr.
Garth.
Having read the book recently, I felt
somewhat disappointed in the way it was presented here. Oddly enough, this
version of Middlemarch seemed both
too long and too short simultaneously. Had more been removed, the series might
have felt more compact and less rife with storylines that begin only to fizzle
out and be forgotten almost immediately. Had more been put in, those same
storylines that felt disconnected and unnecessary could have been fully
explored and their importance made much more apparent. Instead, we get
something in the middle, a perfectly watchable series that honestly could have
been so much more. Sadly, it is much more Middlemarch-light
than Middlemarch. (on DVD)
3 stars
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