A Lot of Little

I recently completed a task that seems almost too daunting. I watched two versions of Little Dorrit. One was the 1988 film version, originally released in two parts, as I recall, and starring Derek Jacobi. The second was a BBC miniseries that aired on Masterpiece Classic during the Charles Dickens "festival" earlier this year. The ubiquitous Matthew Macfadyen played the lead role of Arthur Clennam that had been Jacobi's part in the earlier version.

Why would simply watching a movie and a miniseries be daunting? If you have to ask that, you must never have read the Dickens novel on which it is based. It's one of his whoppers at 826 pages. The first film version clocks in at six hours; the miniseries bests it by taking almost eight full hours to watch. It took me weeks to get through both of them, thanks to my schedule.

Both versions are solid adaptations, but they emphasize different elements, of course. The 2008 miniseries, for example, picks up the plot thread about the murderous Frenchman Rigaud that had been deleted from the earlier version. Both, though, are gloriously Victorian and delightfully Dickensian. I particularly enjoyed the Clennan house in both versions. It's an architectural monstrosity, and there's a constant rain (it seems constant) of dirt pouring through it. The home, in both cases, is just about as I would have imagined it after reading the description in the novel.

Watching these films nowadays, I was struck by the amount of attention given to the character of Mr. Merdle, the so-called "man of the age." Merdle makes all of his money in speculative ventures. In other words, he's a banker/broker using other people's money to get rich. When it inevitably all falls apart, an entire nation seems to collapse with his schemes. How very remarkable of Dickens to warn us a century ahead of time about the dangers of the stock market and banking.

What I will remember most, though, are the performances. In the 1988 version, the film is anchored by the performance of the great Alec Guinness as Mr. Dorrit, the long-time resident of a debtors' prison who comes into a great fortune, only to realize that money cannot help him to erase his years in solitude. Guinness is quite the peacock in his scenes at the prison, forcing everyone to make him the center of attention he so desires to be. It was also a treat to see Joan Greenwood, Guinness' former co-star from Kind Hearts and Coronets forty years earlier, in the pivotal role of Mrs. Clennam. She's just as fussy and cranky as the character in the novel. There's even a young Miriam Margolyes playing Flora, the once-beautiful girl of Arthur's dreams, now older and not quite so thin as he remembers. Margolyes has a deft touch with comedy, but she also allows you to see the desire her character retains for a love match with Arthur.

In the newer version, Tom Courtenay is brilliant as Mr. Dorrit. He allows us, even more than Guinness does, to see the fragility of Dorrit's ego. Eddie Marsan as Pancks, that character who seems to have his hands in a bit of everything, is so much fun to watch. The snorts and sniffs he makes are spot-on with the kind of little traits Dickens liked to give to his characters. And I particularly admired Macfadyen's performance here. I think I first noticed him in the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice from a few years ago; he was, of course, Mr. Darcy. He was also in Frost/Nixon last year. However, here he is called upon to be a strong moral center to the action, perhaps even more so than Claire Foy's Amy, Little Dorrit herself, the character usually given credit for being the moral compass, and he is compelling to watch in the part. I even found him to be quite sexy, to be honest.

The BBC version is, as you might expect, more faithful to the text itself. They are masters, those folks at the BBC, in replicating the look and feel of previous eras. I've enjoyed all of the adaptations of Jane Austen's novels that they've done over the years. The film version is more intriguing, though. The first half of the film is told from the perspective of Arthur Clennam, thus making Jacobi the focus of our attention. The second half shifts to that of Amy's perspective, so we see the action through the eyes of Sarah Pickering's Little Dorrit. It's an inspired choice, just as successful as the more faithful adaptation from twenty years later.