A Dance to the Music of Time

It's possibly a bit late to post this question but as I have only now managed to see the video, here goes anyway. Does anyone know WHY it was deemed necessary to replace James Purefoy and Emma Fielding as Nicholas Jenkins and his wife in the last film of the series? Most of the other characters were left to age, convincingly or otherwise, even Widmerpool himself. Though Joanna David did at least bear a tolerable resemblance to how Isobel (Fielding) might have looked in later life, John Standing, excellent actor though he is, didn't look remotely like an aged James Purefoy. The changeover broke the continuum of events for me and was a constant source of irritation. What was behind this strange, irrational decision?

Though nothing can compare with the books this is quite a fine stab, studded with the finest English talent of its period sensitively cast, and moderately faithful to significant portions of the books. The narrator's voice and perspective are well maintained though oddly James Purefoy is replaced by an excellent but jarring John Standing in the last episode while most of the other actors are cosmetically aged with varying degrees of success. Simon Russell Beale excels but does not dominate as the repulsive Widmerpool and the female characters live as they don't always in the books where they are seen through men's eyes. The music is well chosen and used from Coward's "Twentieth Century Blues" onwards and the use of visual art, including the eponymous Dance is apt.

This was an adaptation that was almost bound to fail. Squeezing 12 novels into eight hours of television allows just 40 minutes per novel. 'The Valley of Bones' was condensed into just 17 minutes. If this had been done well it would truly have been a miracle of compression. However, it was achieved by eliminating about two-thirds of the book.

So it is really rather surprising that the adaptors should have created scenes which were only hinted at rather than described in the book. I counted four, all of which added unnecessary violence and gore. I think if Powell had wanted to make these scenes explicit he would have done so - but he preferred for them to happen offstage.

What is also hard to forgive was the decision to play fast and loose with the chronology towards the end of the series. For example, the launch of 'Fission' should have been immediately after the end of the war rather than somewhere in the mid 50s, while the award of the Magnus Donners prize took place in 1968 or 9 rather than 1963. Anyone who has any feel at all for the period would know that the difference is immense.

But there are good things about this too. The casting is excellent with no-one out of place; the atmosphere for the most part convincing and compelling. A pity that the cast did not have the chance to work through a real adaptation, rather than this drastic and unsatisfactory abridgement.

No, I haven't read the books, but I have read Proust, and you can bet Mr. Powell read him too. Powell's first volume appeared thirty years after Proust's death, and a greater valentine can't be imagined.

Both "Dance" and "In Search of Lost Time" are panoramic multi-generational quasi-autobiographical narratives of the gentry they knew. Lower class types pop in from time to time, but they never take center stage for long. Both genteel epics run more than 3000 pages. Major characters are rarely single portraits, but are usually drawn from composites of two or three prototypes. Both works chronicle the human cycles of birth, education, coupling, re-coupling, decay and death.

In addition to writing earlier, Proust had the structural advantage of writing the beginning and end of his novel first, spending the rest of his life filling in the middle. It was a meditation on the nature of memory, and underlying all the gossip and melodrama is an awareness that there is a coherent thesis and philosophy tying the whole journey together.

At least as presented here, no such unifying ideas are discernible in Powell. We meet characters of greater or lesser interest, they do the things that people do (and sometimes don't do, and occasionally never have done in the history of the world). They learn, age, crack-up and die, but the whole thing just kind of trails off and rumbles to a stop rather than ends. We may have a good time getting there, but I wind up wondering why we made the trip.

In response to criticisms of the abridgment, we should note that Powell, as a former screenwriter, was not upset at the reshaping of his work for TV. Nicholas Coleridge reports: "Powell, himself, says that 'Somewhat to my surprise' he is happy with the adaptation. 'It seems quite alright to me,' he told me with faltering voice, on the telephone. 'I think they've done it as well as this medium possibly can.'"

Across the board, the actors are almost uniformly pleasing. Simon Russell Beale has been rightly cheered for his remarkable and daring Widmerpool, but Michael Williams (Judi Dench's late husband) is outstanding as Ted Jeavons, and Edward Fox steals every scene he's in, no surprise there. James Purefoy as Nick has to do a lot of listening, and occasionally he does it wonderfully well.

I was not upset at the recasting of half a dozen characters in the fourth film. Some of the young actors looked quite silly in extreme age makeup as practiced 10 years ago. I'd have been happier if it had been more widespread. It took me about 8 seconds to register that Nick and Isabel and Jean were played by different actors, and then I plunged right back into the story. I'm sorry for the viewers that were derailed by the substitutions, but I wasn't.

I am perplexed by the character of Pamela Flitton as played here in her unique patented performance by Miranda Richardson. She is a vicious, irritable, impatient, destructive, sexually voracious, uncontrolled and uncontrollable woman, everything that panics an English writer from Charles Dickens to Bram Stoker and onward.

Pamela is a crimson-lipped vampire straight out of Hammer Horror, and not one thing she does or says has a motivation. I hope the books are more coherent in explaining why, why anything.

BTW, the film "A Business Affair," from novels by Barbara Skelton, gives Pamela's prototype's side of the story, and I look forward to seeing it by way of further illumination. There's precious little to comprehend on view here. She just is.

Anyway, this is all professionally done and makes for entertaining viewing. It may not be the absolute best of its genre, but it's a long way from the worst. It is highly recommended to people who like British miniseries based on long novels.

OTOH, no one has ever made a good movie out of Proust, they're all terrible. There's a wonderful published screenplay Harold Pinter wrote for Joseph Losey, but it was never produced. If you want to spend a year reading 3000 pages, please start first with Proust, then take on Powell for dessert.

Hands down, this is the best miniseries or film that I have ever seen. Everything about this miniseries was my cup of tea: the clothes, the scenery, the dialogue, the many handsome actors, just everything. I had broken down and bought myself one of those PAL video players as so many video tapes that I wanted to see were only available in PAL format. As an American NTSC videotape user, it was hard for me to reconcile the purchase of the special PAL VCR, until I saw this miniseries in all its glory. What an absolute confection! I wanted to be a part of the story. I find it hard to believe that this miniseries is not available to the American market in NTSC format. This miniseries far surpasses Brideshead Revisited, among others. Although Simon Russell Beal certainly did a phenomenal acting job, I also thought James Purefoy displayed alot of range and depth particularly in the difficult role of an observer narrator. I really can't say enough about how marvelous this miniseries was! It was worth every penny spent to see this miniseries!