Little Mushroom

 
Dankodes is starting Little Mushroom in a week's time, if you'd like to participate in the book club.

Review: "Middlemarch" (1994 adaptation)

Katy and I watched the 1994 adaptation of “Middlemarch”, which Andrew Davies wrote right before doing the only good “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation to date. He’s an uneven writer, occasionally inspired and more frequently leaden. I was unimpressed with the carelessness he displayed when asked about his favourite Trollope novel in 2015: “While we were rehearsing my BBC adaptation of “The Way We Live Now”, I got talking to one of the actors, Oliver Ford Davies, a tremendously knowledgable Trollope enthusiast. I asked him if he knew of any other Trollope novels with a comparable edge and intensity, and he suggested I look at “He Knew He Was Right”, a book I’d never heard of.” By the time the BBC is producing the your adaptation of a man’s novel, you should probably have skimmed his “Who’s Who” entry. This level of thoroughness is probably only to be expected, given that Davies’ work is so often half-baked. It’s truly disappointing, however, because Davies’ best work shows how capable he can be if he does make an effort. As a mature artist, why waste both your rare chances to make art on this scale and everyone’s time on mediocrity? These are chances I’ll probably never have, so I’m not really inclined to be gracious about this man’s squandering his ample supply of them.

Anyway, not having read the book I can say that this largely works from my limited point of view. The beginning is awkward, though, and Ladislaw is badly handled all ‘round. The romance never quite coheres. Davies starts to talk about the estate Ladislaw’s actually entitled to, but never circles back to the topic. It’s left as an odd lingering question. Casaubon’s malignant influence is alluded to, but does not, I think, fully flower on the screen. The adaptation’s ending plops. Even an ambivalent novel ending could, I think, feel a bit more structurally unified in its dramatic presentation. The awkward resort to a voiceover from Judi Dench as Eliot, who we've never yet heard a word from, feels like the waving of a white flag.

It’s slightly unfortunate that Elliot makes a wrong guess about the future direction of scholarship on comparative religion. She seems to suggest that the topic’s been exhausted by recent contemporary German work when in fact it’s about to blow up in a big way, on the continent and in the UK. Max Weber, “Golden Bough”, “Totem and Taboo”—still all to play for. Writing back to your intellectual milieu and engaging in dialogue with it just carries this risk, I guess.

The most surprising element of the plot is that the crap brother who gets Fuckboi Fever pretty fully recovers. Astounding. Never seen a case like it.

"In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Eliot among the most important Western writers of all time." It’s tragic that after you die you can't stop Harold Bloom from liking you, at great detriment to your reputation.

I’m thinking about reading “Middlemarch”, but am slightly put off by how I took up "Silas Marner" and didn't finish it because Eliot got so weird about class so fast. ‘Now what you—I’m just going to go ahead and assume we’re all posh here—can't comprehend are the absolutely limited and tiny minds of poor people. And it's all situational, right, but poor people? Functionally dim children. This is SJ." I mean. Is it, girl? Is this the way? Iiiii am not so sure. Gaskill wouldn't have done me like that. Say what you will about Lizzie Hexam's inexplicably perfect diction, but at least she's allowed a functioning brain? That choice to assign agency to her, arguably 'at the expense of realism', has been made to give room to her personhood.