Little Dorrit

BBC Radio 3 puts out a fascinating programme each week entitled "Building a Library" in which CDs of classical works are compared and evaluated culminating with a "best buy" recommendation. This would hardly be possible with works of cinema where very rarely are there more than two versions, the first invariably the winner as a movie can only be that good to tempt a remake. I suppose one could do a "Building a Library" with "Hamlet" but I wouldn't be in a position to take that on as I only know two versions (Olivier and Branagh) really well. How about a collective "Building a Library" - film versions of Dickens, say, - now that would be a real challenge. Here goes! I won't deal with all as that would take up too much user comment space. Just a few for good measure. Remember Noel Langley's "Pickwick Papers" of 1952 - great fun with a host of good cameo parts from people such as Joyce Grenfell, Hermione Baddeley, Donald Wolfit, Harry Fowler and others but all rather lightweight compared with the rest I have chosen. Earlier still was Cavalcanti's version of "Nicholas Nickleby" for Ealing, some good sets and the scene where wicked Uncle Ralph gets his desserts wonderfully atmospheric, but so much to cram into a film of moderate feature length that scenes scarcely have time to breathe. Although a good try it all seems too rushed. The oddball in this little collection is undoubtedly a 1988 Portugese version of "Hard Times" set in modern day Lisbon by Joao Botelho, well worth seeing as a curiosity but hardly to be compared with my remaining four choices, each very special in its own right. I would have to include one TV version in my shortlist as the BBC generally do their classic serials so well and were on superlative form with their 1999 "David Copperfield", even capping George Cukor's richly entertaining 1935 film. (Just occasionally a more recent version is better!) The reason I admire the BBC version so much is the wonderful casting with Maggie Smith, Pauline Quirke and Nicholas Lyndhurst playing roles they were just born for. There is even a diminutive Harry Potter playing young David most affectingly. It is probably the Dickens adaptation that moves me the most though I suppose it has to be eclipsed by the three that have that greater degree of cinematic imagination. These are the marvellous David Lean '40s adaptations of "Great Expectations" and "Oliver Twist" and most recently Christine Edzard's "Little Dorrit". For a long time "Oliver Twist" was my favourite of the Lean pair, oodles of atmosphere, wonderful art direction and camera-work and a rooftop climax to take the breath away, but I suppose "Great Expectations" has it for libretto, late as opposed to early Dickens and Lean an ever faithful interpreter of the novel's range and subtleties. Without Christine Edzard's "Little Dorrit" it would be the winner. Her remarkable independent production for length alone (two films totalling six hours) dwarfs all contenders. She cleverly tells the same story from the different perspective of the two main protagonists, Arthur Clennem and Amy Dorrit, this "Rashomon" like approach dominating the first half of each film. The pace is leisurely but always purposeful - none of those irritating longueurs of characters taking up time to cross a street or room that bedevil so many TV adaptations. Street scenes in particular have an amazing sense of realism with hoards of people bustling along giving the feeling of just how busy Victorian London must have been, the credit sequence of Part I wonderfully effective in depicting this. We sense from this very opening the loving care with which every background detail of Dickens's vast fresco of society will be unfolded. As in the novel everything revolves around the theme of money and the misery that both possession as well as dispossession can bring. The casting is faultless with marvellous swansongs from Joan Greenwood and Max Wall and Alec Guinness possibly at his finest as William Dorrit, a superb portrayal of a shallow man with delusions of grandeur. Throughout Edzard is at pains to eschew anything that smacks of pathetic fallacy by not over dramatising atmosphere, but the film never looks plain. Although most of the exteriors are studio constructed the interiors have an extraordinary sense of authenticity down to the last detail. Everything looks and sounds exactly right such as the shabby wallpaper of a livingroom in the Marshalsea with at one point the seemingly endless buzzing of a solitary fly. Unlike the Lean films this is one that seems constructed out of everyday incidents rather than great dramatic setpieces. It is not a film that moves and excites as much while one is watching it, until, that is, the final half hour. When it reaches the tragedy of William Dorrit's mental confusion at a society banquet followed by the terrible scene leading up to the suicide of Merdle where he visits his son and daughter-in-law to borrow a knife we have the realisation that to search for an adaptation that more perfectly realises Dickens's intentions would be an impossibility.

The first 20 minutes is excellent with the story constantly being moved forward yet never feeling rushed. Things seem to play out in real time, as though this was theatre and not just film. Much like other favoured female characters in Dicken's stories from those books written in the 1840s and 1850s Amy Dorrit is a dutiful kind daughter much like Florence Dombey, Little Nell or Agnes in David Copperfield. Nor does the story have a diabolical villain like Uriah Herp, Squeers or Quilp. The characters here are complex, some embody unhealthy off-putting attributes but that doesn't make them your typical TV or Film bad guys. This film operates with a high level of realism in that respect. The story though is happy to poke fun at some of the absurdities of Victorian society, Government departments, impossible to navigate or prisons were men are held because they haven't paid their debts, while being completely unable to work in order to pay off that debt.

The Little Dorrit we meet in part 1 is one we see very little of but think about a great deal. She's a kind sweet shy character, just like our hero and that's why I think they work so well together. You're longing for them to come together. Little Dorrit is slightly cruelly contrasted with Flora, a middle-aged, overweight, forward, outspoken, silly woman. Some of the production design and sound editing is also brilliant, the poverty we see at the end in the living quarters the sound of the shouting, the yelling coming through the thing walls, the sound of squalor, poverty and the flies buzzing around his room. The film also works at a symbolic level too, the needle work Little Dorrit does so well displaying the quiet patient nature of her personality.

The film doesn't rely on frantic editing, loud sound, jump scares, over the top performances or gag after gag. It's a mature film, asking it's audience to think and feel more deeply.

I love the sound design as our main character returns to his mothers home, the creaky floorboards and the wind howling away outside. The costumes are also superb and really inject some colour into the film. The casting is also excellent and then you have the original story by Dickens, a superb storyteller. When we meet Mr Dorrit played by Alec Guiness it's such an interesting character, despite his reduced circumstances it's made clear he's very much still a gentleman who has a great deal of sway inside the prison.

The actress playing Little Dorrit speaks very little to begin with, it's often as much about what she isn't saying than what she is. The actress has very dark eyes, dark hair, a very thin frame, and gives the character a slightly sickly look and a slightly mournful sad look. There's no trace of exuberance or vanity or anger within her. It's quite common among Dickens characters, she's a downtrodden outcast in a sense, like Oliver Twist or Little Nell who still retains her innocence and goodness.

In Part 1 every scene is seen through his eyes. It's quite a clever device as we really get to know him an see things from his perspective. Equally we wonder once he's left the room how the other characters who remain do next.

"Little Dorrit" is hands-down the best movie I've ever seen. One of the best things about it is that it is two movies telling different sides of the same story. I enjoy watching it because I notice something new with every viewing. If you watch one scene in the first movie and watch it in the second movie (e.g., the "parricidal" scene), there are subtle differences based on the storyteller's perception. In "Nobody's Fault", when Amy comes to visit Clennam in the Marshalsea, he sees her wearing the flowered shawl that she always wore when she was poor; when we see the same scene in the second film, she is wearing a black shawl bought when she was wealthy.

The acting is top-notch. The set designs and costumes are the most authentic I have ever seen. The production worked hard to match the original drawings that accompanied the Dickens novel. A sheer delight!

Little Dorrit is thought by many critics to be Dickens most important book, a blistering attack on the evils of the Victorian world in which he lived. Quite a bit of it came from real life. Dickens' father had spent some time in the Marshalsea debtors prison, and several of the corrupt landlords and incompetent officials of the book were based on prominent real people. The establishment was NOT amused, and neglected it so aggressively that it has always been much less well-known than most of his work.

This film has also dwelt in the shadows. As a pair of 3-hour films that are best viewed in a single day (with a break), nobody could figure how to handle it commercially. Also, it only exists today as a long-out-of-print VHS tape and 4-disc laser set. Maybe someday the Critereon Collection will issue a DVD, but I'm not holding my breath.

Nonetheless, it was one of Alec Guinness's very best performances, and, if you love - or even just like - Dickens, the whole 6 hour total-immersion experience is magical.

Roger Ebert's review from 1988, which is online several places, really captures how special "Little Dorrit" is.

The recent TV adaptation of Little Dorrit sent me out in search of this movie version, which I hadn't seen since its original release.

This mammoth project was written and directed by Christine Edzard and is the closest that cinema has come to capturing the richness of a Dickens novel. I enjoyed seeing it again on DVD, but I was disappointed to find it was not nearly as good as I had remembered it.

The performances are variable, as you would expect with such a massive cast. However, the leads are generally pretty good.

Derek Jacobi's melancholy is always arresting (and sorely missed in the TV version) but his performance overall lacked some light and shade.

Alec Guinness effortlessly conveys the patrician pretensions of the imprisoned Mr Dorrit (better than Tom Courtney) but we don't get enough of his underlying anxiety when he is released, so his mental breakdown is sprung on us without adequate preparation.

Sarah Pickering is steered through the picture without mishap and is an acceptable Amy, but is clearly not an experienced actor and this appears to be her only screen credit.

In accordance with a long-established tradition a number of the minor characters are played by comics and comic actors. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. This movie is no different.

Patricia Hayes is a good character actor, but for British viewers she carries too much baggage. She is having to fight against her normally forceful personality to play the timorous, oppressed Affery.

Similarly, Bill Frazer is best known for his comedy work, where he typically plays a blustering bully. This comic persona is not quite right for the bogus Casby, but the problem here is not Frazer's performance but the strangely truncated part.

Max Wall was a master of physical comedy who became the darling of 'intellectuals' but he was not an actor and his Fintwinch is not a performance.

Flora was based on a woman Dickens actually knew and his depiction of her was rather cruel. Miriam Margolyes's comic monster may be faithful to Dickens but misses the opportunity to suggest an underlying sadness in Flora.

Of the comics, Pauline Quirke fares best and gives a lovely performance as the mentally-arrested Maggy.

However, my main reservations concern Edzard's screenplay and direction.

She took an unusual approach to this long book. Instead of just breaking it in half, she extracted two parallel story lines and gave us two overlapping first person narratives: Arthur is in every scene in the first movie and Amy is in every scene in the second one. I don't think this experiment really works.

The problem is that Dickens wrote very much in the third person. His complex plots are told through a wide range of characters, spanning the whole social spectrum, and the story moves forward on a broad front. In this book there is too much going on outside the direct experience of Arthur and Amy for a coherent story to be told entirely from their perspectives. Characters pop in and out of the action without us knowing enough about who they are and how they relate to the leads. Things happen without sufficient justification. For example, Pancks denounces Casby as a hypocrite without us seeing any of the hypocrisy. Important plot developments, such as the rise and fall of Mr Merdle, appear out of nowhere.

The first movie, in particular, suffers from this approach. There are noticeable gaps that are only filled in the second movie (if at all) and key narrative strands, such as Arthur's relationship with his mother, are left hanging unresolved. This leaves us intrigued and wanting to know more, which is probably why Edzard did it this way. However, it also means the whole of the first movie becomes a teaser - but it is a three-hour teaser!

I also feel that Ezard is too indulgent with Dickens's dialogue. It is often great, but he wrote for the page, not the screen, and his wordy speeches need severe editing to make them speakable. Edzard sometimes lets them run on too much, leaving scenes over-written and over-long. Overall, I felt she could have used the six hours more effectively.

I also felt that Edzard's relative inexperience as a director was evident on a number of occasions.

In some scenes, the pacing and rhythm is not quite right. In the early stages, in particular, she choreographs Derek Jacobi in slow motion and there are agonising pauses between lines. Elsewhere, her staging is often too theatrical. Characters whirl around the set, going in and out of shot at random, with the camera trailing in their wake. In simple dialogue scenes she hold shots for too long: dwelling on the speaker when when the scene is crying out for a reaction shot. Simple devices, like montages and flashbacks, are curiously unconvincing in ways I immediately sensed but cannot quite describe.

It doesn't help that the sound recording is quite poor (at least on the DVD). I sometimes struggled to pick up individual lines. When Arthur learns of a death abroad, I didn't actually hear who had died and had to wait several minutes to find out. At times, the garrulous Flora could have been speaking Martian for all I knew.

I applaud the ambition of this project, but it is a bit of a mess. It can be a moving, engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable mess. But it is still a mess. It is so manifestly a clunky piece of film-making that I am at a loss to understand the rapturous praise it has received from other IMDb reviewers.

However, I appear to be in a minority of one, so I suppose I must expect to get slaughtered if anyone ever gets round to reading my own comments.