Note: these postings on the film were written 11 years ago and I've changed my mind about the film a lot. I've studied films and Davies's work carefully; also written professionally and blogged a great deal on film. I leave these there as a record of how I did once understand the mini-series and how the others who contributed to the threads understood the mini-series.
Re: TWWLN: Film Adaptation
Well my husband has taped for me the first episode of the series as it has been aired on PBS, and when I have all four episodes safely on my VHS cassette, I look forward to sitting down to watching them.
Andrew Davies, the writer of the screenplay and thus the writer of the series (if not the man whose conception of the work as a film by which I mean the director)), is a very intelligent man. I have watched four of his seven film adaptations of books, and each time he has had a vision, something to say to us today through the lens of the original work. An adaptor -- or, as in the case of film it must be -- a team of adaptors and their instruments, of which actors are only one weapon, choose to contemplate what they have to say not in the rivers of nature but a still pre-worked lake of art. I did put on the tape for a couple of minutes on Monday night because I get home before the series has finished airing. I was struck by the openly parodic nature of the piece: I gazed at a highly theatricalized scene, meaning the way the actors were blocked; in it over- or maybe it was self-consciously dressed up superrich late Victorians were moving about a set that announced itself as as phony.
One of the aspects of Trollope's novel I have been very struck by this time is not only his conservatism with respect to apparently new ways of getting money, but towards women, and people as inexorably constructed by their caste. The latter is not common with him; in other novels, say, Lady Anna (written around the same time), Trollope works to explode the notion that castes do, never mind should, control reality. In all the talk we've had on the film thus far, no one has offered a general view, a comment on what is the perception of experience the film offers to us either through its take on Trollope's novel or our own world. People have dwelt on details, the trees, without any reference to why the wood was composed the way it is.
In my experience Davies' and the screenplays of other people hired to make these film adaptations does have an intention, a meaning. I would be the first to concede he probably does pander to cant values of the larger TV or film audience which rarely reads books, much less a 19th century novel, but thus far in my experience Davies is a man who participates in projects which convey thought-provoking and sometimes highly absorbing intense experiences which speak to us today.
What I am wondering is how this particular film adaptation relates to his others, say Wives and Daughters. What does this film adaptation make public and manifest about the difference between the way readers today might respond to TWWLN as opposed say to Wives and Daughters or other novels by women (most of these adaptations are novels by women where love is taken very seriously)? What assumptions, acceptances, and distortions of reality do we find in Trollope as opposed to the way we live today for real are made manifest and public before us? Today a large percentage of people live together for quite a time before marrying, and serial monogamy is a good word to describe a life's experience of matrimony in our society. What is hilarious and neanderthal in Trollope taken from a serious point of view and what criticism is relevant? I wrote Trollope's criticism of the apparently new way of making moeny (taken as a species of radical conservative) because it was not new: read the history of Bath and you will discover that the beautiful 18th century city so favored today by tourists' was built on financier's schemes, schemes which made a few people very rich, and busted many others, including the gulled. Trollope wants to make a strong distinction between money made from land and business and money made from speculative schemes, but the two have gone together since Shakespearean characters were asking, with some anxiety, "What's new on the Rialto?"
It may be that Davies and Company have something to tell us about Trollope _vis-a-vis_ the way we live now not just the way they lived then. And how they tell us this is of interest when drawn out of an articulated perspective. It may be that the best way to watch this film is to dismiss TWWLN from your mind, look at the story and characters as mere matter to be transposed, but from what I saw it struck me that TWWLN was very relevant to Davies and Company's purposes.
Ellen
April 29, 2002
Re: David Yates & Andrew Davies' TWWLN: Part One
Yates and Davies have taken the story and characters of Trollope's novel and made them the pictorial foci of a grotesque comedy. Except insofar as the viewer watching the film can feel a strong emotional distaste for the values the action of the film dramatizes -- and we are encouraged or at least left free to do so -- this film is not meant to be emotional. The characters are kept at a distance from us; the mood is hard and alienated. In this Yates and Davies' work differs from most film adaptations of 19th century novels picked up or made by the BBC: for example, Wives and Daughters (written by Davies but directed by Nicolas Renton) is a highly emotional "women's emotion picture" in disguise. The film is a fascinating cultural document.
Yates's direction has not been mentioned by anyone on this list -- nor Victoria -- though I suppose it must've been written about in print media. It's more important than Davies' script. The characters and scenes are photographed so as to make things distorted, disjunctive, and very ugly. David Suchet is continually photographed in ways that emphasize his hands; he has clearly been told to hold them out and present them awkwardly. He is wearing very heavy make up on his face; the clothes are those of a mountebank made respectable. He is posed to recall modern sculptures which reflect the way people remember one another's bodies: large hands, enormous heads, small bodies. The same kind of photography plays on the scenes and numbers of the characters (all the Melmottes, Georgiana Longstaffe who is turned into a nagging harridan whose neck muscles bulge out at you); all the visibilia of the commercial modern world which figure forth sex and money (like Mrs Hurtle's neck clothing) are darkly highlighted. When a scene occurs between characters the camera emphasizes the spaces between them. That this is conscious can be seen in the filmed but unspoken episode in which Melmotte (Suchet) is painted and put before a large standing still of a country house as these were once dreamed about in Country Life magazines (which themselves took off from the descriptions of such places in 19th country novels which drooled over them).
This is not to say that the film is overtly a serious depiction of the lack of inner life of our world. The accent is repeatedly on a kind of coarse frivolous materalistic comedy. The book's materialism and philistinism are not seen as obsolete. Oddly this comes out of Davies's choice of text from Trollope's novel. He brings over precisely those dialogues where marriage is seen as all about money; a crude and literal way of reading Trollope's text is disclosed by the film. There is also slapstick now and again. Some of the scenes are done tongue-in-cheek. This is probably to appeal to the parts of the audience Shakespeare called the groundlings (he's for a jig or he's bored).
Our British friends will probably not have seen the "introducer" of such films on American TV: Russell Baker. At the conclusion of the film Baker gave an intelligent perceptive commentary on Lady Carbury as seen in the book: he called her emotionally besotted over a worthless son, part of a vein in the novel which brilliantly sends up the literary marketplace, a woman abused by her husband who now works hard according to the real values of that world: it doesn't matter how good a book is; its success depends on what is said about it and how it's marketed; like Judy he admired Lady Carbury for actually working hard and he likened the depiction of the character to the real Fanny Trollope. Viewers who have never read the book would have wondered what he was talking about since none of this serious drama is in the film. All this has been hollowed out first to present a dark view of our society through filmic techniques and second to (rather dumbly) lighten and simplify Trollope's texts.
There are very interesting casualties. One can see the same types as appeared in film adaptations by the BBC played by the same actors or type of actors. The male type of these sorts of films called (unfortunately out of a sneering mentality) the "victim-hero" is still there, and precisely the actor who played this part in the 1994 Middlemarch under the name of Lydate, plays the part under the name of Roger Carbury here: Douglas Hodge. In terms of playing time, focus, and centrality to the plot Hodge is as much onscreen and important as Suchet, but he has been rendered ridiculous, emasculated by the meanness of the mood. The nobility, yearning for a better world, the selflessness and thoughtfulness of the earlier renditions of this type (Ronald Colman and Dirk Bogart were among the best actors to do it) really is turned into someone embarrassingly vulnerable, weak; the nastiness of our world calls such a person whiny, whinging. Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy) becomes the sexual stud of these folkloric types; so too Felix Carbury (Matthew McFayden). Paul is kept so innocent in this film, probably a sop to readers who still buy into aspects of Victorian mores, but Felix is downright kinky. In physical type both are made effeminate (thus does the male oriented perspective so dominant in films nowdays see these older heroes), but McFayden's performance resembles that of Alessandro Nivola (who played Henry Crawford in the recent Mansfield Park as an ironically leering sexual adventurer) and he looked like the same type who appeared as Wickham in the 1994 Pride and Prejudice: Adrian Lukis. Nothing wholesome here ladies. Have you got odd appetites? This guy is ready for you. What has happened to our serious grave couple at the center of the old Palliser films: played by Susan Hampshire and Philip Lapham. The gestures Hampshire was willing to follow and the kindliness and well-meaningness of this pair were only seen fleetingly in a scene between Ruby Ruggles and John Crump where she manifests that deference to the male and he that protectiveness which once upon a time coloured these films.
New types abound: Melmotte, the clown at the top of the world (I thought of Donald Trump); his daughter, Marie, as yet only given direction, room and space to appear as a Barbie Doll driven by emotions which Part One of this production played up as absurd. I felt sorry for Cheryl Campbell; a woman her age should not have to wear such décolletage. Her body is too old, but this new type is woman as endlessly a sex object, never getting any dignity at all, animal to the end (as I say a crude male view operates throughout many popular movies today). The wrinkled appearance of her lover, Mr Broun (David Bradley) make this pair of lovers (to me) unconsciously visually obscene: the permission given men to get old highlights Campbell's probably desperate struggle to stay young in a slightly overweight body -- this is not allowed by our culture any more. Damn't if you don't look good and damned if you try is the fate of older women. Mrs Hurtle (Mirando Otto) is a mean-spirited take on the type Tennessee Williams presented so frankly in Blanche Dubois: nymphomania as an expression of a woman's quest for love; no pity anywhere for her. Trollope's Mrs Hurtle knew enough to keep up her guard; not this new film type. Don't ask for love in this new world. Nor respect. The depiction of Hetta Carbury as a "new woman" seeking something to do beyond marrying -- a career or real love was the opposition -- just doesn't fit. No wonder feminism can't get anywhere. Who can take it seriously?
The real irony of the production is that Trollope's text itself has become a literal fetish; like everything else in the production it is stigmatized as a commodity itself. I was entertained, and in a way Davies and Yates have produced the equivalent of Trollope's text for our time, for Trollope was attacking his very readers, putting something before them by which (if they were able) they could recognize themselves. Davies and Yates have put before us the ugly dream images of our world made grotesque -- as they should be. They have perhaps overcrowded their film: there has been a real attempt to get all the characters into this production: the new technologies allow switching back and forth so quickly that about twice as much sheer information or content can be gotten into a film in the same space of time it took in the 1970s. If I were to criticize the film, it would actually be on the basis the film-makers tried include too much of Trollope's story and characters into their film vision.
I shall watch Part Two next Sunday.
Ellen Moody
From Judy Warner
I wondered, Ellen, if you think Yates and Davies intended consciously to dismiss the novel and to give us something contemporary or if it happened that way--without their conscious intention--while they were trying to make it more "entertaining" or "accessible." Judy Warner
To Trollope-l
April 30, 2002
Re: David Yates & Andrew Davies' TWWLN
Dear Judy W and all,
The film is a filmic equivalent of the vision of the book; it projects a similar idea about society and human nature, but its means are very different. Characters are means of projecting meaning, and very different types are found in films than are found in novels. Characters in films may have the same names but their inner life does not come from the eponymous book, or only tangentially and insofar as the film follows the story (character is a function of plot); the characters are types found in other films of the same genre.
hus the film Paul and the film Felix are sharp versions of sexy males in other films; so too the film Mrs Hurtle. Except insofar as they follow Trollope's story, they are transformed utterly from what is in the book. The picture is angry and mocks so Paul is made effeminate and Felix coarsely kinky. The picture has no pity for any of the women (as is common in male-oriented cinema today) so Mrs Hurtle is not "hurt" any more nor can she do "hurt" (Trollope's serious view): she is Blanche du Bois with no compassion given her whatsoever. The southern accent is seen as sexy, but it may also be a reference. She is even dressed in the way Southern heroines used to be in films. The film Ruby too is a folkloric kind of sex figure. The film is what is found in Hardy movies, a take as condescending and elitist as Trollope's but from a different standpoint, that of the 20th century film which is cynical and exploitative of character and audience. The film Ruby is softened by gestures and words which recall the filmic type Susan Hampshire played in the older (nearly 40 years now so nearly half a century) Palliser films.
Marie is a new type: the Barbie doll. She's young girl as frantic. Melmotte was done in a highly original mode: the l ow-class clown of old (didn't you notice that tie; it comes from circus clowns) has become the hero (another real life equivalent would be George Bush). The point is the film is a work of today, for audience's today; it projects an equivalent meaning to Trollope's but not the same one. It can't and be living. Its audience is also the mass audience and the resort is to modern folkloric types which inhabit films.
This film is different from many other film adaptations. There is no or little attempt to convey an inner life -- in some of the films of the 1990s that was still being done (Middlemarch) and it was still tried in the recent Wives and Daughters. But by and large it is disappearing from all but those films directed to an narrow elite audience and those are seen as "women's films"; they are rarely done in Hollywood, mostly abroad. In our world interiority -- what happens inside of us is not important. No one cares if Bush or other leaders know anything; the wealthy man is admired for seeming to accumulate money, for the prestige objects he surrounds himself with. What is conveyed in this 2001 TWWLN is the impoverishment of culture in late 20th century society, its indifference to anything resembling taste; not just its coldness and meanness but its unawareness that it is cold and mean, or maybe it's celebration of that point of view. Poor Douglas Hodge, what a thankless role his has become. The closest to the old Plantagenet Palliser as a type in this film is the filmic John Crump.
If you want to enter the world of the film and understand it, you must dismiss the literal sensitive detailed interpretations of Trollope's TWWLN from your mind. Dismiss the book except for the general lines of the story events and the conveyed interpretation of the book ijn modern criticism as understood by Davies and Yates. People keep talking about the characters as they are in the book; they are not in the film, none of them.
Ellen
To Trollope-l
April 30, 2002
Re: David Yates & Andrew Davies' TWWLNM
Ellen, I've read with great interest your contributions on the filming of TWWLN and must thank you for them. Very detailed and perceptive. You can buy the video of the tv series here now and I am tempted to do so in the light of your comments.
Angela
From Part One (and I've not seen the other parts) it seems Yates and Davies determined to make a filmic equivalent of Trollope's work: they would take his anger, and dark satire of his world which he conveyed through the techniques (verbal) and conventions (realistic characters) of a 19th century bourgeois courtship novel and through the techniques (pictorial) and conventions (types of characters, clothing, kinds of scenes which characters functioning certain ways in them) of modern film make a grotesquely comic statement about ours. What does disturb me about the film is its anti-feminism, its lack of sympathy for the female types; it could be replied that it has little sympathy for males; they are mostly depicted in the same hard way. The only exceptions to this thus far are (perhaps) Lady Carbury (Cheryl Campbell), Roger Carbury (Douglas Hodge) and John Crump (Nicholas McGaughey). My feeling is the same as I had about Is He Popenjoy?: a brilliant work but so hard. Gosford Park had pity for the characters; it suggested to us that they did have an inner life which could have been worth living had they been given half a chance. I don't know that I like either; I really prefer the "woman's emotion picture" (e.g., the recent Sous la Sable, the 2000 Wives and Daughters).
Film-makers cannot regard novels as sacred objects. That is to make fetishes of them. I suggested in my first posting that Yates and Davies were making fun of this idea itself in making of Trollope's novel a commodity which is for sale and sells this film. The title and name of the author gets people to watch the film. Patricia Rozema produced a Mansfield Park which attempted to give a filmic equivalent not just of MP but also of Austen's Juvenilia and Letters, and hers is a dark reading of the novel. Her reply to her critics has been that she does not regard Austen's novel as a museum piece, is not an anthropologist but remaking the work as a living art which speaks to us equivalently in film terms about our world today. Paradoxically the way to make sense of these film is as an anthropologist :). You see what archetypally and pictorially they project. Now again I found Rozema's MP interesting; I was even moved; but I liked much better the quieter filmic equivalent of MP: Metropolitan.
Ellen Moody
Date: Wed, 1 May 2002
Thank you Ellen for your insightful critique of part 1 of the film adaptation. I look forward to your review of the remainder of the film.
Despite Yates & Davies' previous credentials, I wonder if you put too much credit in their hands to divine, as you say, "the impoverishment of culture in late 20th Century society"? I see Yates & Davies, Hollywoodizing the novel -- cutting, dumbing it down and highlighting the characters that will sensationalize the film. Otherwise, we would see more of the often boring and old-fashioned Roger Carbury and the viewer might even be told that, after a fashion, Roger forgave Paul and Hetta and took them into the bosom of the family as opposed to the film version of Paul and Hetta skipping off into the grand aventure of domestic bliss in the American west.
After an initial negative impression of the film Mrs. Hurtle and, in my opinion, her irritating and put-upon Southern accent, I warmed to her as the only woman in the film who stood on her own. Yates & Davies got her right overall.
I have no problem dismissing the novel when viewing the film and I very much enjoyed your support of creative and artistic adaptation, especially your reference to Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park. As I said earlier, I barely escaped with my life from a Jane Austen List because I supported Rozema's effort. It's a pleasure to be a small part of a group with a broader view.
Especially thank you, Ellen, for your recent recommendation of the film Metropolitan. I found it on half.com and my husband and I have watched is 3 times already. It is an intelligent, sophisticated film that I'm in the process of loaning to worthy friends.
Enjoying the discussions,
Pat Cooper-Smith
To Trollope-l
Re: Yates and Davies's TWWLN
May 2, 2002
To Pat and Judy W and all, Yates and Davies's TWWLN is certainly a commercial and "Hollywoodized" product. Just about all the BBC productions are: they are funded with the exception that they will find some acceptance with the general public. You can see this in the larger-than-life way of photographing and emphatic playing; the melodramatic approach to life is strong: each scene is played up to a kind of pressure that connotes semi-importance. The star system is strong: the star system is important: certain actors are associated with certain kinds of productions, and they play in the public's mind with specific folkloric types the public immediately recognizes and fits into the story. When I screened Bresson's Lancelot du Lac for my two classes this term, at first the students thought it was a home-movie and were puzzled. None of the actors were stars; the types he was evolved from Arthurian material to translate into the fast-moving pictorial form do not correspond to the familiar types in movies (whose evolvution you can trace across the 20the century -- the types in a film like the 1920s Romola were still with us in the recent 2001 Wives and Daughters). Bresson films his productions in natural light. He never made a picture that made money though he garnered many respected awards in the film industry.
When I "read" modern meaning about the lack of inwardness in the film I didn't mean that Davies and Yates consciously thought this out: you interpret a film the way you do a novel; the makers do not necessarily think out what is projected by their techniques and content though they are aware of some of it. The signs that they are aware they are sending up the impoverishment of high culture can be seen in the grotesquerie, the dressing up of Suchet as a semi- clown, the use of that pastiche kitsche picture of a country house with a statue of Suchet in front of it. Some of what forms project to us are the result of the form itself which evolves in response to the audience. David Lean says audiences nowadays get very bored very quickly; they expect speed, computer flash, zoom and quick changes of the camera, so there is little room or time for interiority or subtle effects in films made to make money. In Gosford Park all Altman could so was give us snatches of dialogue and sudden zooming moment which suggest a range of feeling and history to characters which couldn't be shown; in fact he made this impoverishment part of his theme too; it was caught up in the climatic line: "Hush, Jane they'll hear you." It's bad enough to have sensitive feelings; don't show them or the wolves will take advantage or sneer.
I would say Davies and Yates were not consciously dismissing the novel: they made such efforts to include all the characters and all the plots. What they were doing was translating its techniques into filmic ones and trying to convey Trollope's dark satire on his world into a satire on our world. Here's another instance of this: just about from the moment Michael Riley appeared on the screen I guessed him to be Hamilton Fiske. That jaunty walk, that keen eye for the main chance, that gleam of a mock in his face, and his easy comfortableness were all projected in his body movements and face. Hamilton Fiske is the anti-hero of Trollope's TWWLN who actually is a big winner: he gets the girl with the money; he returns to the US complacently; he will end up on top. Trollope tells us Fiske was himself surprized and disappointed in Melmotte. He had not expected it He himself would never have made the same mistakes. He has a thick-skin; he doesn't care what others think of him. He doesn't look back. He takes over. This has been translated into the film filmically and quickly; we are to be amused immediately: Fiske is sane, a go-getter in this world of go-getters; he'll end up with a not-so-small percentage of the take. What else is the modern American dream?
Cheers to all,
Ellen
And now we go back in time to when the film was aired on British TV:
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001
A Prologue:
"Hot off the press", I have this communication to my good friends on Trollope-l, the cast of the film adaptation TWWLN:
Andrew Suchet plays Melmotte
Matthew Macfadyen plays Sir Felix
Cheryl Campbell plays Lady Matilda
Paloma Baeza plays Hetta
Richard Cant plays Dolly Longestaffe
Stuart McQuarrie plays Lord Nidderdale
Angus Wright plays Miles Grendall
Shirley Henderson plays Marie Melmotte
Cillian Murphy plays Paul Montague
Douglas Hodge plays Roger Carbury
Miranda Otto plays Mrs Hurtle
Tony Britton plays Lord Alfred Grendall and
Graham Crowden plays The Marquis of Auld Reekie
UK broadcast will be on BBC1 in four 75 minute episodes from 11 November.
I don't have the name of the person who wrote the screenplay -- which is important, nor do I know the director or producer. The names of the characters have remained the same, except if you feel "Hetta" is more than nickname for Henrietta. I am not sure if "Andrew" isn't a mistype of "David". Was not the actor who played Poiret David?
Ellen
To Trollope-l
Re: Brief but Intelligent Review of The Way We Live Now in TLS
December 9, 2001
Although I could have read a number of the reviews of the film adaptation of TWWLN since they appeared online, I haven't really been doing it -- mostly I haven't had the time, but also from what has been said on our list and Victoria it seems many of them are pandering. The one I did read was by someone who seemed to loathe what Trollope stood for -- he couldn't have read the novel, much less any others by Trollope, and write what he did.
So much for the value of what gets into print or online journals. Clearly the criteria is not real knowledge of one's subject.
Since we have had some talk on Victoria about the film adaptation of Anthony Trollope's TWWLN I thought a summary of a brief review by Lindsay Duguid of the film might be of interest to some. It appears in this past week's TLS (November 30), is entitled "Shares of the anthill" and occurs on p. 22. Basically Duguid is disappointed because what is substituted for the book -- the film itself -- is in comparison highly unsubtle and without much inner life; he also say the narrative line of the film and dialogue are uneven when not downright coarse. He felt that by the third episode, the plot "sagged." He particularly disliked the somewhat upbeat or affirmative note in the ending:
We are left with the notion that the national press (Mr Alf's_Evening Pulpit, though without its famous irony) has saved the day, and that a feminist alliance, hinted at in a series of improbable tete-a-tetes between Hetta and Mrs Hurtle, Hetta and Marie, is stronger than masculine power -- almost the opposite of Trollope's view. Instead of the wholesale bleakness of Trollope, we have just deserts and happy endings. Perhaps we are still not quite ready for The Way We Live Now.
It is so common for even the most apparently dark ending in films to have affirmatioin. Tête-à-têtes between Hetta and Mrs Hurtle and Hetta and Marie! But then that fits in with what is often seen in women's emotion pictures -- and my view is that these film adaptations of classic novels are versions of the old women's emotion picture put into costume for respectability. Paradoxically rather than showing us women's power, the nature of the genre -- disguised -- shows us they are in retreat.
He did like some elements of the production very much. He strongly commended some of the acting:
David Suchet's Melmotte -- almost a pantomime villain with his brocaded bulk, secret smirk and frightening laugh -- compels us to watch his every move; as does Shirley Henderson, who gives a fascinating performance as Marie, passionately flinging herself against her beloved or frowning defiance at her father. Macfadyen's Sir Felix is an elegant wastrel, whose cry of 'It's not fair!' sums up a type. The bit parts -- Croll the clerk, the Marquis of Auld Reekie and Dolly Longestaffe -- are strongly supportive. It is the 'good' characters, those with a complex inner life, who have a hard time of it. Paul Montague, Roger Carbury nd Hetta Carbury have a struggle to express their vacillating feeilngs from beneath their wigs and heavy make-up. Trollope creates his characters from a mass of atmooshpereic description and analysis of motive. On screen, this is often reduced to the baldest dialogue ....
Examples of the latter follow. Duguild takes my view on the snatch of dialogue Tim Phillips put on our list about the hidden sexual lives of Victorians -- that Davies simply makes explicit what is implicitly true in the novel but in so doing coarsens or seems to falsify the "feel" of the period. An important aspect of the sexual lives of 19th century bourgeoise is that they had to hide it -- in corner rooms of far-away hotels :).
Duguild does like some of the decor. I'd like to see the movie for this. Movies communicate through pictures. That's what they basically are. Duguild suggests some of the scenes evoke a Tissot painting, though maybe it's overdone: "Lady Carbury, the historical novelist, persuasively presents her garlanded bosom to the newspaper editors Mr Broune and Mr Alf ..."
And he does think the "broad cynicism" of the film's perspective is both in keeping with Trollope's text and appropriate for the realities of our time.
Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody
On Part One:
I quite enjoyed the first episode of TWWLN - as Howard said, the acting was excellent, and Cheryl Campbell in particular was superb as Lady Carbury. David Suchet went a bit over the top as Melmotte, but probably the character requires that.
However, personally speaking, I was a little disappointed with the dialogue, which seemed a bit heavy-handed compared to the delicate touch in Trollope's novel. Possibly the problem was that much of the first episode was a "prequel", showing how the various characters meet and form their relationships, whereas the novel starts in mid-flow, with these romances, friendships and enmities already established.
I suppose I was expecting a lot after Andrew Davies' previous adaptations, Pride and Prejudice and Wives and Daughters. Judging from the first episode, I'd say his rendering of TWWLN doesn't quite reach these heights - but it is still a beautifully-filmed, quality production, and could improve in future weeks. Let's hope it attracts more readers to Trollope and helps to get more of the books back in print.
Cheers
Judy Geater
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001
I agree with Judy in that I quite enjoyed the first episode of TWWLN and agree with all her comments, Cheryl Campbell really caught the character of Lady Carbury so well. As an instance of Suchet's OTT Memlmotte I didn't see why he had to have such bad table manners. We know he is an upstart and vulgar but I didn't think it was neccessary to see him slurping his food around so disgustingly, wouldn't he have learnt at least a veneer of civilisation after all that time in Vienna and Paris?
I loved the scene when the Prince arrives at the ball and Mme Melmotte is caught stuffing a dessert, it was handled very well.
I also thought the guy who plays Felix (forgotten who) gets his character right, particulatly in the way he treats his mother.
I am looking forward to the next instalment.
Cheers
Roger
Months later:
March 28, 2002
Re: The BBC The Way We Live Now
The BBC film adaptation of Trollope's The Way We Live Now will air on US Public TV channels. The film has been picked up by the Exxon Mobil Masterpiece Theatre people. This week's _New Yorker_ shows a picture of David Suchet as Melmotte, with an overheading "Some swindles never go out of style", and tells the reader that the first episode will air on Monday evening, April 1st, at 9 pm. Since I don't watch TV normally I don't know as yet if that means the episodes will air each Monday night (that's the way Brideshead Revisited was originally done and also on a weekday instead of Sunday night, the usual night for the Exxon Mobil people) or will air several nights in a row. The schedule will also vary from region to region. So it may air on the New York City public TV channel (13) on Monday but may appear here on the DC area public TV channel (26) on another night.
Anyway look out for it.
I can see from the picture of Suchet why people may have been disappointed or not comfortable with this actor as Melmotte. As got up, Suchet does not look the way I have always imagined Melmotte. For a start he has an apparently genial expression on his face. I never imagine Melmotte as really apparently genial. Then Suchet has this absurd gold bow around his neck, with a glaringly red overdone waistcoat. Again I don't see Melmotte as colorful; perhaps this was the way to indicate to a mass audience that the man was seen as vulgar by the genteel types in the novel. However, the look in Suchet's eyes is sharp and intelligent, cagey, wary, and the film adaptation must differ from the novel. It must be a 2002 product for a 2002 audience, and proceed filmically. I look forward to this one and hope others will be able to watch it here in the US too. It comes just at the right time for our read.
Ellen
To Trollope-l
April 13, 2002
Re: TWWLN: Film Adaptation
Well my husband taped for me the second episode of the series and when I have all four episodes safely on my VHS cassette I look forward to sitting down to watching them.
Andrew Davies, the writer of the screenplay and thus the writer of the series (if not the man whose conception of the work as a film by which I mean the director)), is a very intelligent man. I have watched four of his seven film adaptations of books, and each time he has had a vision, something to say to us today through the lens of the original work. An adaptor -- or, as in the case of film it must be -- a team of adaptors and their instruments, of which actors are only one weapon, choose to contemplate what they have to say not in the rivers of nature but a still pre-worked lake of art. I did put on the tape for a couple of minutes on Monday night because I get home before the series has finished airing. I was struck by the openly parodic nature of the piece: I gazed at a highly theatricalized scene, meaning the way the actors were blocked; in it over- or maybe it was self-consciously dressed up superrich late Victorians were moving about a set that announced itself as as phony.
One of the aspects of Trollope's novel I have been very struck by this time is not only his conservatism with respect to apparently new ways of getting money, but towards women, and people as inexorably constructed by their caste. The latter is not common with him; in other novels, say, Lady Anna (written around the same time), Trollope works to explode the notion that castes do, never mind should, control reality. In all the talk we've had on the film thus far, no one has offered a general view, a comment on what is the perception of experience the film offers to us either through its take on Trollope's novel or our own world. People have dwelt on details, the trees, without any reference to why the wood was composed the way it is.
In my experience Davies' and the screenplays of other people hired to make these film adaptations does have an intention, a meaning. I would be the first to concede he probably does pander to cant values of the larger TV or film audience which rarely reads books, much less a 19th century novel, but thus far in my experience Davies is a man who participates in projects which convey thought-provoking and sometimes highly absorbing intense experiences which speak to us today.
What I am wondering is how this particular film adaptation relates to his others, say Wives and Daughters. What does this film adaptation make public and manifest about the difference between the way readers today might respond to TWWLN as opposed say to Wives and Daughters or other novels by women (most of these adaptations are novels by women where love is taken very seriously)? What assumptions, acceptances, and distortions of reality do we find in Trollope as opposed to the way we live today for real are made manifest and public before us? Today a large percentage of people live together for quite a time before marrying, and serial monogamy is a good word to describe a life's experience of matrimony in our society. What is hilarious and neanderthal in Trollope taken from a serious point of view and what criticism is relevant? I wrote Trollope's criticism of the apparently new way of making moeny (taken as a species of radical conservative) because it was not new: read the history of Bath and you will discover that the beautiful 18th century city so favored today by tourists' was built on financier's schemes, schemes which made a few people very rich, and busted many others, including the gulled. Trollope wants to make a strong distinction between money made from land and business and money made from speculative schemes, but the two have gone together since Shakespearean characters were asking, with some anxiety, "What's new on the Rialto?"
It may be that Davies and Company have something to tell us about Trollope _vis-a-vis_ the way we live now not just the way they lived then. And how they tell us this is of interest when drawn out of an articulated perspective. It may be that the best way to watch this film is to dismiss TWWLN from your mind, look at the story and characters as mere matter to be transposed, but from what I saw it struck me that TWWLN was very relevant to Davies and Company's purposes.
Ellen
April 29, 2002
Re: David Yates & Andrew Davies' TWWLN: Part One
Yates and Davies have taken the story and characters of Trollope's novel and made them the pictorial foci of a grotesque comedy. Except insofar as the viewer watching the film can feel a strong emotional distaste for the values the action of the film dramatizes -- and we are encouraged or at least left free to do so -- this film is not meant to be emotional. The characters are kept at a distance from us; the mood is hard and alienated. In this Yates and Davies' work differs from most film adaptations of 19th century novels picked up or made by the BBC: for example, Wives and Daughters (written by Davies but directed by Nicolas Renton) is a highly emotional "women's emotion picture" in disguise. The film is a fascinating cultural document.
Yates's direction has not been mentioned by anyone on this list -- nor Victoria -- though I suppose it must've been written about in print media. It's more important than Davies' script. The characters and scenes are photographed so as to make things distorted, disjunctive, and very ugly. David Suchet is continually photographed in ways that emphasize his hands; he has clearly been told to hold them out and present them awkwardly. He is wearing very heavy make up on his face; the clothes are those of a mountebank made respectable. He is posed to recall modern sculptures which reflect the way people remember one another's bodies: large hands, enormous heads, small bodies. The same kind of photography plays on the scenes and numbers of the characters (all the Melmottes, Georgiana Longstaffe who is turned into a nagging harridan whose neck muscles bulge out at you); all the visibilia of the commercial modern world which figure forth sex and money (like Mrs Hurtle's neck clothing) are darkly highlighted. When a scene occurs between characters the camera emphasizes the spaces between them. That this is conscious can be seen in the filmed but unspoken episode in which Melmotte (Suchet) is painted and put before a large standing still of a country house as these were once dreamed about in Country Life magazines (which themselves took off from the descriptions of such places in 19th country novels which drooled over them).
This is not to say that the film is overtly a serious depiction of the lack of inner life of our world. The accent is repeatedly on a kind of coarse frivolous materalistic comedy. The book's materialism and philistinism are not seen as obsolete. Oddly this comes out of Davies's choice of text from Trollope's novel. He brings over precisely those dialogues where marriage is seen as all about money; a crude and literal way of reading Trollope's text is disclosed by the film. There is also slapstick now and again. Some of the scenes are done tongue-in-cheek. This is probably to appeal to the parts of the audience Shakespeare called the groundlings (he's for a jig or he's bored).
Our British friends will probably not have seen the "introducer" of such films on American TV: Russell Baker. At the conclusion of the film Baker gave an intelligent perceptive commentary on Lady Carbury as seen in the book: he called her emotionally besotted over a worthless son, part of a vein in the novel which brilliantly sends up the literary marketplace, a woman abused by her husband who now works hard according to the real values of that world: it doesn't matter how good a book is; its success depends on what is said about it and how it's marketed; like Judy he admired Lady Carbury for actually working hard and he likened the depiction of the character to the real Fanny Trollope. Viewers who have never read the book would have wondered what he was talking about since none of this serious drama is in the film. All this has been hollowed out first to present a dark view of our society through filmic techniques and second to (rather dumbly) lighten and simplify Trollope's texts.
There are very interesting casualties. One can see the same types as appeared in film adaptations by the BBC played by the same actors or type of actors. The male type of these sorts of films called (unfortunately out of a sneering mentality) the "victim-hero" is still there, and precisely the actor who played this part in the 1994 Middlemarch under the name of Lydate, plays the part under the name of Roger Carbury here: Douglas Hodge. In terms of playing time, focus, and centrality to the plot Hodge is as much onscreen and important as Suchet, but he has been rendered ridiculous, emasculated by the meanness of the mood. The nobility, yearning for a better world, the selflessness and thoughtfulness of the earlier renditions of this type (Ronald Colman and Dirk Bogart were among the best actors to do it) really is turned into someone embarrassingly vulnerable, weak; the nastiness of our world calls such a person whiny, whinging. Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy) becomes the sexual stud of these folkloric types; so too Felix Carbury (Matthew McFayden). Paul is kept so innocent in this film, probably a sop to readers who still buy into aspects of Victorian mores, but Felix is downright kinky. In physical type both are made effeminate (thus does the male oriented perspective so dominant in films nowdays see these older heroes), but McFayden's performance resembles that of Alessandro Nivola (who played Henry Crawford in the recent Mansfield Park as an ironically leering sexual adventurer) and he looked like the same type who appeared as Wickham in the 1994 Pride and Prejudice: Adrian Lukis. Nothing wholesome here ladies. Have you got odd appetites? This guy is ready for you. What has happened to our serious grave couple at the center of the old Palliser films: played by Susan Hampshire and Philip Lapham. The gestures Hampshire was willing to follow and the kindliness and well-meaningness of this pair were only seen fleetingly in a scene between Ruby Ruggles and John Crump where she manifests that deference to the male and he that protectiveness which once upon a time coloured these films.
New types abound: Melmotte, the clown at the top of the world (I thought of Donald Trump); his daughter, Marie, as yet only given direction, room and space to appear as a Barbie Doll driven by emotions which Part One of this production played up as absurd. I felt sorry for Cheryl Campbell; a woman her age should not have to wear such décolletage. Her body is too old, but this new type is woman as endlessly a sex object, never getting any dignity at all, animal to the end (as I say a crude male view operates throughout many popular movies today). The wrinkled appearance of her lover, Mr Broun (David Bradley) make this pair of lovers (to me) unconsciously visually obscene: the permission given men to get old highlights Campbell's probably desperate struggle to stay young in a slightly overweight body -- this is not allowed by our culture any more. Damn't if you don't look good and damned if you try is the fate of older women. Mrs Hurtle (Mirando Otto) is a mean-spirited take on the type Tennessee Williams presented so frankly in Blanche Dubois: nymphomania as an expression of a woman's quest for love; no pity anywhere for her. Trollope's Mrs Hurtle knew enough to keep up her guard; not this new film type. Don't ask for love in this new world. Nor respect. The depiction of Hetta Carbury as a "new woman" seeking something to do beyond marrying -- a career or real love was the opposition -- just doesn't fit. No wonder feminism can't get anywhere. Who can take it seriously?
The real irony of the production is that Trollope's text itself has become a literal fetish; like everything else in the production it is stigmatized as a commodity itself. I was entertained, and in a way Davies and Yates have produced the equivalent of Trollope's text for our time, for Trollope was attacking his very readers, putting something before them by which (if they were able) they could recognize themselves. Davies and Yates have put before us the ugly dream images of our world made grotesque -- as they should be. They have perhaps overcrowded their film: there has been a real attempt to get all the characters into this production: the new technologies allow switching back and forth so quickly that about twice as much sheer information or content can be gotten into a film in the same space of time it took in the 1970s. If I were to criticize the film, it would actually be on the basis the film-makers tried include too much of Trollope's story and characters into their film vision.
I shall watch Part Two next Sunday.
Ellen Moody
From Judy Warner
I wondered, Ellen, if you think Yates and Davies intended consciously to dismiss the novel and to give us something contemporary or if it happened that way--without their conscious intention--while they were trying to make it more "entertaining" or "accessible." Judy Warner
To Trollope-l
April 30, 2002
Re: David Yates & Andrew Davies' TWWLN
Dear Judy W and all,
The film is a filmic equivalent of the vision of the book; it projects a similar idea about society and human nature, but its means are very different. Characters are means of projecting meaning, and very different types are found in films than are found in novels. Characters in films may have the same names but their inner life does not come from the eponymous book, or only tangentially and insofar as the film follows the story (character is a function of plot); the characters are types found in other films of the same genre.
hus the film Paul and the film Felix are sharp versions of sexy males in other films; so too the film Mrs Hurtle. Except insofar as they follow Trollope's story, they are transformed utterly from what is in the book. The picture is angry and mocks so Paul is made effeminate and Felix coarsely kinky. The picture has no pity for any of the women (as is common in male-oriented cinema today) so Mrs Hurtle is not "hurt" any more nor can she do "hurt" (Trollope's serious view): she is Blanche du Bois with no compassion given her whatsoever. The southern accent is seen as sexy, but it may also be a reference. She is even dressed in the way Southern heroines used to be in films. The film Ruby too is a folkloric kind of sex figure. The film is what is found in Hardy movies, a take as condescending and elitist as Trollope's but from a different standpoint, that of the 20th century film which is cynical and exploitative of character and audience. The film Ruby is softened by gestures and words which recall the filmic type Susan Hampshire played in the older (nearly 40 years now so nearly half a century) Palliser films.
Marie is a new type: the Barbie doll. She's young girl as frantic. Melmotte was done in a highly original mode: the l ow-class clown of old (didn't you notice that tie; it comes from circus clowns) has become the hero (another real life equivalent would be George Bush). The point is the film is a work of today, for audience's today; it projects an equivalent meaning to Trollope's but not the same one. It can't and be living. Its audience is also the mass audience and the resort is to modern folkloric types which inhabit films.
This film is different from many other film adaptations. There is no or little attempt to convey an inner life -- in some of the films of the 1990s that was still being done (Middlemarch) and it was still tried in the recent Wives and Daughters. But by and large it is disappearing from all but those films directed to an narrow elite audience and those are seen as "women's films"; they are rarely done in Hollywood, mostly abroad. In our world interiority -- what happens inside of us is not important. No one cares if Bush or other leaders know anything; the wealthy man is admired for seeming to accumulate money, for the prestige objects he surrounds himself with. What is conveyed in this 2001 TWWLN is the impoverishment of culture in late 20th century society, its indifference to anything resembling taste; not just its coldness and meanness but its unawareness that it is cold and mean, or maybe it's celebration of that point of view. Poor Douglas Hodge, what a thankless role his has become. The closest to the old Plantagenet Palliser as a type in this film is the filmic John Crump.
If you want to enter the world of the film and understand it, you must dismiss the literal sensitive detailed interpretations of Trollope's TWWLN from your mind. Dismiss the book except for the general lines of the story events and the conveyed interpretation of the book ijn modern criticism as understood by Davies and Yates. People keep talking about the characters as they are in the book; they are not in the film, none of them.
Ellen
To Trollope-l
April 30, 2002
Re: David Yates & Andrew Davies' TWWLNM
Ellen, I've read with great interest your contributions on the filming of TWWLN and must thank you for them. Very detailed and perceptive. You can buy the video of the tv series here now and I am tempted to do so in the light of your comments.
Angela
From Part One (and I've not seen the other parts) it seems Yates and Davies determined to make a filmic equivalent of Trollope's work: they would take his anger, and dark satire of his world which he conveyed through the techniques (verbal) and conventions (realistic characters) of a 19th century bourgeois courtship novel and through the techniques (pictorial) and conventions (types of characters, clothing, kinds of scenes which characters functioning certain ways in them) of modern film make a grotesquely comic statement about ours. What does disturb me about the film is its anti-feminism, its lack of sympathy for the female types; it could be replied that it has little sympathy for males; they are mostly depicted in the same hard way. The only exceptions to this thus far are (perhaps) Lady Carbury (Cheryl Campbell), Roger Carbury (Douglas Hodge) and John Crump (Nicholas McGaughey). My feeling is the same as I had about Is He Popenjoy?: a brilliant work but so hard. Gosford Park had pity for the characters; it suggested to us that they did have an inner life which could have been worth living had they been given half a chance. I don't know that I like either; I really prefer the "woman's emotion picture" (e.g., the recent Sous la Sable, the 2000 Wives and Daughters).
Film-makers cannot regard novels as sacred objects. That is to make fetishes of them. I suggested in my first posting that Yates and Davies were making fun of this idea itself in making of Trollope's novel a commodity which is for sale and sells this film. The title and name of the author gets people to watch the film. Patricia Rozema produced a Mansfield Park which attempted to give a filmic equivalent not just of MP but also of Austen's Juvenilia and Letters, and hers is a dark reading of the novel. Her reply to her critics has been that she does not regard Austen's novel as a museum piece, is not an anthropologist but remaking the work as a living art which speaks to us equivalently in film terms about our world today. Paradoxically the way to make sense of these film is as an anthropologist :). You see what archetypally and pictorially they project. Now again I found Rozema's MP interesting; I was even moved; but I liked much better the quieter filmic equivalent of MP: Metropolitan.
Ellen Moody
Date: Wed, 1 May 2002
Thank you Ellen for your insightful critique of part 1 of the film adaptation. I look forward to your review of the remainder of the film.
Despite Yates & Davies' previous credentials, I wonder if you put too much credit in their hands to divine, as you say, "the impoverishment of culture in late 20th Century society"? I see Yates & Davies, Hollywoodizing the novel -- cutting, dumbing it down and highlighting the characters that will sensationalize the film. Otherwise, we would see more of the often boring and old-fashioned Roger Carbury and the viewer might even be told that, after a fashion, Roger forgave Paul and Hetta and took them into the bosom of the family as opposed to the film version of Paul and Hetta skipping off into the grand aventure of domestic bliss in the American west.
After an initial negative impression of the film Mrs. Hurtle and, in my opinion, her irritating and put-upon Southern accent, I warmed to her as the only woman in the film who stood on her own. Yates & Davies got her right overall.
I have no problem dismissing the novel when viewing the film and I very much enjoyed your support of creative and artistic adaptation, especially your reference to Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park. As I said earlier, I barely escaped with my life from a Jane Austen List because I supported Rozema's effort. It's a pleasure to be a small part of a group with a broader view.
Especially thank you, Ellen, for your recent recommendation of the film Metropolitan. I found it on half.com and my husband and I have watched is 3 times already. It is an intelligent, sophisticated film that I'm in the process of loaning to worthy friends.
Enjoying the discussions,
Pat Cooper-Smith
To Trollope-l
Re: Yates and Davies's TWWLN
May 2, 2002
To Pat and Judy W and all, Yates and Davies's TWWLN is certainly a commercial and "Hollywoodized" product. Just about all the BBC productions are: they are funded with the exception that they will find some acceptance with the general public. You can see this in the larger-than-life way of photographing and emphatic playing; the melodramatic approach to life is strong: each scene is played up to a kind of pressure that connotes semi-importance. The star system is strong: the star system is important: certain actors are associated with certain kinds of productions, and they play in the public's mind with specific folkloric types the public immediately recognizes and fits into the story. When I screened Bresson's Lancelot du Lac for my two classes this term, at first the students thought it was a home-movie and were puzzled. None of the actors were stars; the types he was evolved from Arthurian material to translate into the fast-moving pictorial form do not correspond to the familiar types in movies (whose evolvution you can trace across the 20the century -- the types in a film like the 1920s Romola were still with us in the recent 2001 Wives and Daughters). Bresson films his productions in natural light. He never made a picture that made money though he garnered many respected awards in the film industry.
When I "read" modern meaning about the lack of inwardness in the film I didn't mean that Davies and Yates consciously thought this out: you interpret a film the way you do a novel; the makers do not necessarily think out what is projected by their techniques and content though they are aware of some of it. The signs that they are aware they are sending up the impoverishment of high culture can be seen in the grotesquerie, the dressing up of Suchet as a semi- clown, the use of that pastiche kitsche picture of a country house with a statue of Suchet in front of it. Some of what forms project to us are the result of the form itself which evolves in response to the audience. David Lean says audiences nowadays get very bored very quickly; they expect speed, computer flash, zoom and quick changes of the camera, so there is little room or time for interiority or subtle effects in films made to make money. In Gosford Park all Altman could so was give us snatches of dialogue and sudden zooming moment which suggest a range of feeling and history to characters which couldn't be shown; in fact he made this impoverishment part of his theme too; it was caught up in the climatic line: "Hush, Jane they'll hear you." It's bad enough to have sensitive feelings; don't show them or the wolves will take advantage or sneer.
I would say Davies and Yates were not consciously dismissing the novel: they made such efforts to include all the characters and all the plots. What they were doing was translating its techniques into filmic ones and trying to convey Trollope's dark satire on his world into a satire on our world. Here's another instance of this: just about from the moment Michael Riley appeared on the screen I guessed him to be Hamilton Fiske. That jaunty walk, that keen eye for the main chance, that gleam of a mock in his face, and his easy comfortableness were all projected in his body movements and face. Hamilton Fiske is the anti-hero of Trollope's TWWLN who actually is a big winner: he gets the girl with the money; he returns to the US complacently; he will end up on top. Trollope tells us Fiske was himself surprized and disappointed in Melmotte. He had not expected it He himself would never have made the same mistakes. He has a thick-skin; he doesn't care what others think of him. He doesn't look back. He takes over. This has been translated into the film filmically and quickly; we are to be amused immediately: Fiske is sane, a go-getter in this world of go-getters; he'll end up with a not-so-small percentage of the take. What else is the modern American dream?
Cheers to all,
Ellen