Dickensblog

In the first episode of A Tale of Two Cities on MGM+, Charles Darnay is smuggling a refugee from France to England with more sangfroid and street smarts than one would have expected of him, when he gets in a knife fight with Barsad and eventually ends up nearly perishing in front of Lucie Manette, who saves him with her medical training, which puts Lucie at odds (not for the first time) with her guardian, Hester Lorry, widow of the late Jarvis Lorry, who has Jerry Cruncher for a valet. Meanwhile, in France, Madame Defarge is all huggy. And this is just in the first 20 minutes.

In short, there is not much plot in this version so far that’s recognizable, at least until Darnay, Lucie, and Carton all end up in that fateful British courtroom. We get most of the familiar characters in the familiar settings, but they move through those settings in quite unfamiliar ways.

If you’re wondering if I found this annoying, yes and no. Yes, because when a lot of people love a story, why can’t filmmakers just show us the story we love? There’s something that feels almost like oppositional defiant disorder in the constant insistence that everything in recent period dramas just has to be different from the source material, and it does get exasperating. And no, because for all the strange and sometimes inexplicable changes, they’re still getting at something essential about the story.

(Of course, it may just be that having to watch Mrs. Joe whip Pumblechook in the BBC/FX Great Expectations has lowered my own expectations to the cellar.)

It helps that the cast is uniformly strong. Kit Harington makes an excellent Sydney Carton, and you know that for me that covers a multitude of sins. He conveys just the right blend of recklessness, self-loathing, tenderness, and longing — that “flung away, wasted” quality we know so well from the book. François Civil is also very good as Darnay, and kudos to the filmmakers for committing to find lookalike actors and leaning into the resemblance in a way that not all adaptations have done. Lucie, of course, is a thoroughly modern woman — that’s another recent period drama tendency we just can’t get away from — and sometimes it works all right and sometimes not, but Mirren Mack handles the characterization well. Madame Defarge hasn’t had much to do yet beyond being uncharacteristically huggy, but Roxane Duran is wonderfully haunting just standing still and staring in the scene where the child is crushed to death by the Marquis’s carriage.

It’s Hester Lorry who suffers most in the translation. She’s obviously standing in for both Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry (and I would love to know how that thought process went: “Those two were always good together; suppose they were married? But they got married before Lucie even knew them? And now he’s dead?”). But the writer stripped away all the best parts — all the fun parts — of both roles. Sharon Duncan-Brewster is as capable as all the rest, but she doesn’t get to be wild and ferocious and fiercely loyal like Miss Pross, or kind and gently humorous like Mr. Lorry. She doesn’t get to do much of anything except be a sourpuss. Maybe that will change in future episodes; I hope so, because I’m keenly feeling the loss of the original characters. Not only is their comic relief very much missed — whoever said ATOTC is Dickens’s least humorous book forgot all about those two — but also, it’s sad to see Lucie without any sort of close companion and confidant.

In fact, so far — and again, maybe this will change — it seems what humor there is has mostly been allotted to the main characters over the supporting characters, which is most un-Dickensian. Also, there’s very little actual Dickensian dialogue — so little that I was actually jolted when Sydney came out with “I care for no man, and no man cares for me.” Again, this is both unnecessary and irritating; Dickens may have gotten too flowery in his writing for Lucie and her daughter at times, but in the main he wrote great dialogue. On the plus side, we have some interesting connecting of plots and subplots and set pieces, which suggests that writer Daniel West was paying attention to the original story even though he chose so often to divert from it. Madame Defarge’s storyline and the killing of the child and the spilling of the wine in the street are all linked in a way that’s compelling and makes sense, for example. On the directorial side, Richard B. Clark gives us shots like Carton catching sight of Lucie and Darnay gazing at each other in the courtroom, and Carton’s reflection being split in two by a tavern mirror, that may be obvious but are nonetheless effective.

That brings us to the end of Episode 1. If you’re watching, or if you just have thoughts about what I’ve written, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. More when Episode 2 drops next week!

(Image courtesy of MGM+.)