Andrew Davies’s Middlemarch (film as history), Wives and Daughters (film as great woman’s novel transposed)

Lydgate laughing at Keepsake album as “beautifully idiotic” (Middlemarch)

Molly and Squire Hamley reading one of Roger’s letters from Africa (Wives and Daughters)

Dear Friends and readers,

As I wrote a few days ago I’ve been watching Andrew Davies’s film adaptations for a couple of weeks now as my background work towards writing about his film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, for now specifically his 2008 Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (with Anne Pivcevic as his producer). This is a second blog meant for me to work out my thoughts and keep a record on what I’ve watched thus far.

I began with an early adaptation of a Dickens story, and will tonight go on to two 1990s adaptations. I am also grouping them by putting together those with a similar theme, mood, or filmic techniques. Davies learned and developed his craft in more conventional as well as different sophisticated and cunning ways) as he went along, and was allowed to be more daring after each success.

To write about more than one movie at a time is not that easy to do since one of many things I’ve been so impressed by is his enormous variety, and bold willingness to experiment as well as how prolific, perceptive (of his original texts) and intertextual (with other films) his work is. Still, I’ll try. Like many writers, I write to make sense of what I’ve discovered. To coin an E.M. Forster line, I can tell what I think when I see what I’ve said.

So for this blog I’ll cover two of his 1990s film adaptations: the 1994 BBC/WBGH Middlemarch (director Anthony Page, producer Louis Marks) and the 1999 BBC/WBGH Wives and Daughters (director Nicholas Renton, producer, producer Sue Birtwistle). They are both adaptations of masterpiece 19th century novels by women, are transpositions, and the emphasis is on dramatic characters and content so they are naturalistic in feel.

Much has been written about Davies’s Middlemarch and there are a large number of intelligent pages devoted to comparing the film to George Eliot’s book in “Middlemarch on TV: A Symposium,” George Eliot — George Henry Lewes Studies, 26-27 (1994):36-81.

So what can I add here? it’s very great, moving, sombre, psychologically subtle as well as naturalistic. The colors throughout are muted: browns, greens, tans, the color of the natural world and ordinary buildings. Davies and his team stick to continuity in the manner of 1970s-80s film adaptations, much is conveyed through words in fully developed carefully nuanced dramatic scenes; the storyline and symbols feel controlled — there is some voice over and flashbacks with dreams, but this is kept to a minimum. This is a stately production, quiet sober melodious music, the paratext is the title carved in stone:

As people have remarked, the central figure is no longer Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey), but instead Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge), even if she is still a core force in the film’s drama and a linking figure. Davies makes Casaubon (played so movingly by Patrick Malahide) a sympathetic figure, a weak and intense man and makes a parallel between Casaubon’s broken dreams and Lydgate’s explicit. Casaubon’s affection for Dorothea is touching before the marriage and he is a poignant figure when told he is to die. Casaubon may be waspish, and he is utterly self-centered, short-tempered, all of which makes him very real; he is also sensitive, isolated, and wants his project to reach people. The most moving still in the whole movie is of Malahide from the back looking at the flowing river after he has been told by Lydgate, he could die of a heart attack at any time.

Davies also brings out his older man’s love for this young woman (a subject which Davies repeatedly returns to and makes far more emphatic than his sources do) and the vulnerability of the well-meaning ethical man (so Lydgate brings us back to Stephen Daker of A Very Peculiar Practice).

Davies displays great sympathy for Dorothea: she is innocent because her wealth has sheltered her. Her nature is not vain, and her impulse is to plain truth-telling: as with Lydgate Davies is developing a core type of heroine: Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea resembles Justine Waddell as Molly in gestures, words, body stance.

Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea

Strong truths about life are dramatized and given utterance. For example, “marriage: it can be a noose”
Dorothea’s uncle, Mr Brooke (Robert Hardy) warns.

Turning toa slightly sarky essay on this filmic Middlemarch in The Classic novel: from page to screen, ed Giddings and Sheen, Platt and MacKillop, Ian MacKillop and Alison Platt’s “‘Beholding in a magic panorama: television and the illustration of Middlemarch,” MacKillop and Platt point out the film goes for a larger and social perspective far more than an intimate delving (which George Eliot does in her book). I’d say this is also true of Davies 1998 Vanity Fair (A&E/BBC, Marc Munden, Gillian McNeill, which I’ll write about another time).

Opening montage takes us through town, elections, countryside

The film works the way a friend and scholar, Carlo Bitossi wrote about in some lecture notes he sent me: there is a genuine historical framing. One could say the film-makers have tried to use film to tell wider history.

This as opposed to Davies’ Jane Austen adaptations where intimacy is what is aimed at and which remain narrowly focused. I’d say this is true of Davies’ Wives and Daughters too. And I think the difference may be the result of the way George Eliot is respected as making a male’s kind of novel while Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen remain in a enclosed female space to male minds. Paradoxically it’s often a woman character who brings out the world’s view, as here comically incisive Elizabeth Spriggs as Mrs Cadawaller.

MacKillop and Platt commend Davies Farebrother character and Simon Chandler’s performance as a man of unfufilled potential, simply there, but whose intelligence and decency shines out.

Farebrother gambling, slightly desperate

I’ll add this character anticipates Davies’ Dobbin (out of Vanity Fair) by as acted by Philip Glenister (both harking back to Davison’s comical version in Steven Dakar). They say in this in mini-series each part is conceived of separately as a unit.

There’s this good point they bring out: this adaptation (like other fine ones) makes alive what we often forget; the 80 familiar memories most people will trot out out of a possible 500 memories are significantly added to.

Davies has taken a novel which deliberately uses unhistoric or fictional small people whose contributions count as much as any historic ones (so it’s the same point as Graham Swift in his Waterlands), those not famous or in the light or whose contributions go askew: this means not just Dorothea and Lydgate, but Fred Vincy (Jonathan Firth) and Mary Garth and Farebrother too. The enemy of promise for Lydgate is Rosemary Vincy but as played by Trevyn McDowell, she has a life she wants to live too. How painful it was to me to see how she didn’t value this man and his gradual realization he wasn’t valued.

Finally, they suggest that the BBC surrounded the production with paraphernalia intended to show how difficult it was to adapt is significant: the film-makers took their attempt to move back in time and history seriously. This is part of what can be characterized as this movie’s attempt to be another medium in which to convey history. Prof Bitossi’s lectures show just how difficult it is, how factious or fiction-making most of the visuals one has to put together to make a picture of. It becomes a time capsule where modern technologies recreate (and to a large extent) misrepresent what we are seeing literally. The philosophical problems here are too complicated for me to go into here.

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Davies offered a characteristically insightful interview on his conceptions for Wives and Daughters. I want to highlight what he said about Molly Gibson:

It’s a pretty close run between her and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice for the most appealing heroine in English literature. I’m the father of a daughter, and Molly brought out those feelings in me. You feel very protective towards her, even though she can stick up for herself. She’s not the prettiest girl in the story, and you sympathize with her when all these chaps look past her and see Cynthia and immediately stop paying her any attention.

Osborne Hamley:

He was the character who gave me the most problem with the script, because when I read the book, I thought: “My God! This is the first gay character in 19th-century literature!” Then I thought: “No, it couldn’t be.” You get the feeling when Osborne comes on that the revelation about him is going to be that he’s gay, because in the book he really is quite effeminate in his manner. He seems to be a caricature of a gay character. He’s always talking about the opera, he’s very good with older ladies, he has a very close relationship with his mother, he can’t stand his father. The secret French wife and the child seemed a bit unlikely to me, and so I tried to make him more Keatsian – not a drooping spirit, but a passionate, poetic character, who just had the bad luck to have a growing and fatal illness.

Tom Hollander as Osborne Hamley with loving mother (Penelope Wilton), literally made ill by repressed life with squire

And the modern appeal of the situation:

It’s about second families, isn’t it? In the book, of course, you’ve got second families because of people dying young. Nowadays, it’s because of divorce and remarriage. But the problems are the same, aren’t they?

Family group: Roger Hamley, Molly, Mr Gibson, Mrs Gibson, Cynthia.

My VHS Cassette version is 4 parts, 75 minutes each. I admired what I did last time: the performances and script; and I noticed again the story had been rearranged so as to make the Hamley story as and more important than the Gibson one. Also that Osborne Hamley (Tom Hollander) had been made a central figure, not somewhat to the side, with Cynthia (Keeley Hawes) similarly emerging more dominant.

As this is a later Davies and he is freer with his source and uses more bold techniques, I saw more into the film as a Davies’ film. The last part of W&D is more changed from the book than the earlier parts — it is after all unfinished and Davies takes more open liberties than with Middlemarch. Not only is Preston made sympathetic, but as Gaskell didn’t get to finish the book, Davies choses his own ending and alters matter coming up to it to fit.

The film is a richly pastoral, indeed Arcadian environment, with richly colored flowers and much dark greenery. The houses of the wealthy are ornate; there is much scientific equipment to be seen, books, botanizing in the Hamley as well as Gibson household. When we are in Africa, we move to a burnt-orange, yellow and brown palette, but there too intense beauty is caught. All this is fascinating and well-done.

To turn to particulars, Davies develops further his depiction of the father and daughter as intensely loving and interdependent, this really revelatory of Davies’ preoccupations and presentation of him self in his work. IN the film Mr Gibson believes Molly’s story, accepts her refusal to tell it all and immediately guesses the real culprit is Cynthia – – it is so painful in the book where at first he does not believe Molly. IN the film Molly is not quite as ill (in the book she seems to come close to dying), and in the film Mr Gibson is using the illness that to try to keep Roger and Molly apart. It is in the film more emphatically than the book Lady Harriet (Rosamund Pike) to the rescue, Osborne dies, and Molly and Roger (Anthony Howell) marry: we are spared the wedding and instead have that appropriate ending in Africa. All along Davies has alluded to Molly’s interest in science (which to be fair is important in Gaskell’s novel), the growth of new enlightened attitudes in medicine and respect for science, and this is the age of women travelers. Much of the proto-feminism of Molly’s remarks are in Gaskell, not made up; the dialogues we hear are often in the book.

Davies also builds up Preston’s (Iain Glenn) relationship with Cynthia, and shows sympathy for Preston in insisting on his point of view: he loved her, thought she loved him, is intensely enamoured of her sexually, won’t let go. This is very like Davies 2002 Dr Zhivago (Granada/WBGH, Giacomo Campiotti, Anne Pivcevic, to be discussed in another blog) where the same interaction of feeling and sentiment informs Davies’ conception of Lara (who like Cynthia at first loves and then turns to hatred) and Komarovksy (Sam Neill was more subtle about showing this, but then he’s the older man). (This emphasis and perspective is a development out of Elizabeth Gaskell, but one could read Gaskell’s text quite another way — as sheerly hostile to Preston as a cold unscrupulous cruel ambitious man.)

Preston as first seen grimly riding his horse

The sexuality of a man (Preston’s) gripped by a woman is repeated in Davies’s portrait of Mr Gibson’s (Bill Patterson) marriage to Mrs. Gibson (aka Hyacinth Kirkpatrick, Francesca Annis)

Mrs Gibson is made one of the obtuse unchangeable horrors of life: a continual liar, deceitful, obtuse to all but her ugly way of seeing the world (not just utterly materialistic but everyone and thing is measured by rank – it is a misogynistic stereotype), but now the sex complicates it as it’s brought out.

But here is a more comic moment of this filmic monster, Mrs Gibson

This is very much a woman’s film, showing a woman’s world and it is at the intimate level of reality such things are experienced as destroying life. And they do, in the home which is hard for many women to escape still.

Wives and Daughters is also over-wrought with emotion (something made by the film-makers partly because of this association with the matter with women’s novels), and in that falsifying. In this sense the 1994 Middlemarch is the truer to actual life film: more sombre. The feel of Middlemarch 1994 captures our dream of quiet realities, as in the Bulstrode story

Mr and Mrs Bulstrode (Peter Jeffreys and Rosemary Martin disturbed and estranged from one another by a lower class guest)

Bulstrode now under considerable stress since he does not see his way to getting rid of his old business partner who knows of his corruption and dishonesty

The over-wroughtness of Wives & Daughters reminded me of what Cardwell and others argue: women’s books are treated differently than men’s. I can see the macho-male attitude towards women’s books in Davies’s interviews for the press, not Davies so much but Davies keeping up with the honcho-type director he has to cope with and posture in front of.

It’s telling that in the interview with Nic Ransome Davies says he’s rejected from fully American projects, called “effete.” The periodical on masculinity in American typologies in popular movies especially is spot on and embodied in such people (who alas have power to make or not make movies). Every other paragraph has the word “fucking” in it; and it’s not just sprinkled in as “you knows” are (meaning “as it were”), it’s Davies keeping up with the macho-male self-presentation of Ransome. They outdo one another in talking of “babes” (beautiful actresses); nevertheless, the reader who is paying attention realizes Davies is talking of how this very macho culture precludes doing sensitive perceptive film-adaptations of better novels in the US cinemas — and tells one story of his own experience of rejection and its grounds.

Since Davies dwells more on the sister pairs of Molly and Cynthia than Gaskell and he makes Cynthia more sympathetic, the feel of this relationship is also homoerotic and deeply sympathetic to women as his portrayal of the Misses Browning (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findley)

Still I’d say that Davies and Cardwell are wrong if it be that Davies really sees his Wives and Daughters as two steps back to his 1995 BBC/WBGH Pride and Prejudice— one must take all he says in public as also meant for his particular listener and not underrate W&D.

I found some of the dramatic scenes in the opening two parts of Moll Flanders uneven: Davies is having trouble with the allegorical and uncontrolled kind of unconscious writing that intermixes with realism in 18th century novels, especially in the earlier part of the century), have scenes which are total and/interesting failures, and the brilliance and memorabilty of the second 2 parts of Davies’s Moll Flanders is not from technique but the daring amoral matter and sudden move into deep depression and open self-destructive, self-hatred of the central character; that’s content.

So much more than Middlemarch, Davies creates from intertexuality in Wives & Daughters: in an interview with Nic Ransome ( “A Very polished practice: an interview with Andrew Davies,” The European English Messenger, 10:1 [2001]:34-41), Davies complains that the director made him move 2 steps back in his technological development. He had wanted to move beyond his 1996 Moll Flanders (Granada/WBGH David Attwood, David Lascelles, also to be discussed in another blog) to use ironies, visuals, and cinematic techniques of distancing montage, and artifice; this is an adaptation which is conventional, very like the 1995 Pride and Prejudice (BBC/WBGH, Simon Langton, Sue Birtwistle) he said.

Well, yes and no. I noticed the music echoed music in Brideshead Revisited and nostalgia was worked up, use of blurring, the mise-en-scene rich and ornate greens, and this was done especially in the sequence where Mrs Gibson went to London with Cynthia and we have a few minutes of the renewal of Mr Gibson and Mollys’ relationship. Davies is daring here — he again and again in his series broaches this area of the older man loving the young girl, here really a father and daughter. It reminded me of Sebastian and Charles Ryder sequences with a use of voice-over too as the father and daughter revel together at a picnic in a meadow, and eating before the fireplace alone.

The film also exhibits intertexuality with famous books: Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon is just brilliant) coming out with Osborne in his arms, and the use of “never” shows Lear and Cordelia are meant. Osborne’s death with the fly over him is naturalistic death. Strong secularism here, a lack of religious belief (also seen in Raven’s 194 BBC Pallisers). Davies turns to Austen for some of the bitterly ironic but subdued lines of Gibson to his wife. Brideshead Revisited techniques are seen in the build up of Roger and Molly’s romance, but also the use of dance from Austen, and the final “yes” scene is clearly James Joyce’s Ulysses’ Molly. Roger and Molly are modelled partly on Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, but it’s clear Roger is another Steven Dakar — once again Steven Dakar is seen repeatedly in versions of heroes in Davies’ films from Yuri Zhivago to Arthur Clenham.

Partricia Stoneman’s essay (“Wives and Daughters on Television,” The Gaskell Society Journal, 14 [2000]:85-100) is limited because of her fidelity criteria; she has this idea of “what is true to the spirit” of the original, an unprovable notion which leaves us with impressionism: still, she is perceptive and does give details from the production. She praises the production as true to the spirit of Gaskell and the original book. But we cannot from her grasp what is literally used filmically front of us and what we are liking concretely that cannot be in the book.

Cardwell’s Andrew Davies includes a few remarks on this film. She singles out strong female protagonists but does not suffciently see the weak males which hold center of films: emotional men, needing ties — as from A Very Peculiar Practice on. Things to remember especially: he selects his novels, he involved in selection (p 115), and tendency to ensemble drama with several voices contributing to final perspective. He displays sympathetic irony and often with villains (Preston), p 115, he has tussles with the author or quarrels, repairs, changes because he really thinks he sees more deeply or can improve and make relevant, and in his ability with direct dialogue and human insight into feelings he does very well.

Cardwell does admit she doesn’t like romance and prefers irony or epic (a male preference is shaping this) so she downplays W&D and P&P in comparison to MF, the 2001 The Way We Live Now (BBC/WBGH, David Yates, Nigel Stafford-Clark, discussed in another blog), and Dr Zhivago.

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To conclude, Middlemarch may be considered at its best a serious attempt to bring a literary masterpiece to life. The film-makers through all their techniques: mise-en-scenes, filming on doctored locations, costumes, paraphernalia, dialogue, the kinds of scenes chosen, e.g. Will Ladislaw (the beautiful Rufus Sewell) working on Brooke’s newspaper and trying to find a place in the modern world, and Lydgate’s attempt to practice modern medicine and his entanglements in local politics.

Bulstrode encounters his past in the meadow — with Caleb Garth (Clive Russell) as estate manager; Bulstrode and Garth have just been discussing how to modernize Bulstrode’s newly inherited estate

W&D is semi-original women’s film, allusive, rich in techniques and Davies character types and attitudes, intricate, psychological in a more penetrating and iconclastic way; it’s the same producer as the 1995 P&P and same script editor and the two film adaptations are alike –only this one more lyical.

Molly and Roger walking off together away from us at the close of Wives and Daughters.

My respect for Davies’ insight, complexity of vision, artistry has gone way up over these past three weeks, and it increases at each film adaptation by him I see.

Ellen