Our Mutual Friend (Repackaged) [DVD] [1998]

This DVD is definitely worth the money, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

I don't think this production is perfect -- not, for example, in the same class as the TV adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories with Jeremy Brett or a number of other successful adaptations I could mention. Nevertheless, it is very good.

First, as something SEEN, it is, of course, a treat. And here is where the medium excels. Watching something like this reminds one how visually literate19th-century people were. There were shoddily built buildings, but brutalist architecture was unknown. Women's fashions impress, too. Nowadays, so many clothes, even for women, are hopelessly utilitarian, ugly, or in poor taste; expensive showpiece clothes from highly paid designers are often silly, boring, or intended to shock rather than please. But these people had a highly developed visual sense and knew what looked good. When you see Bella in a ball-gown with her hair up, you can literally SEE how she would entrance. One doesn't really get the visual aspect of that world when one reads a book but doesn't see with the eyes -- or only occasionally and in black-and-white photos.

To the characters. Mr. and Mrs. Boffin seem well cast to me. I think the two young women, Bella and Lizzie -- two important characters here -- came across well. They were well-chosen, their different styles of beauty and manner as one might have imagined them from the book. Lizzie one might describe as a "handsome" woman with very good features and a quiet manner. Bella, as a "pretty" woman, smaller and daintier with a livelier and more girlish manner. One could see how Bella might appeal to a rather young man like John Harmon. They would be around the same age -- 19 -- but Lizzie has had to grow up rather fast.

John Harmon, the central character in the book, was, I thought, not cast so well. He should really have been bigger, stronger, and slightly older. One recalls that Dickens describes him as having an arm like a sailor's and that in one scene (not shown in this adaptation) Riderhood, not a particularly nervous character, is cowed by Harmon's physical presence and moral force.

The villains -- Roger Riderhood and Bradley Headstone -- are convincing enough. The final scene between Headstone and Charlie Hexam is actually done rather well. It's worth remembering that, insofar as Headstone is capable of love at all, it's probably Charlie that he has some love for. As Lizzie rightly says, Headstone "says" he loves her -- and there's a world in that "says". Actually, he DESIRES her -- as what man, given the right circumstances, might not? But there seems nothing more. He doesn't love her, if we're to understand by that his having a deep regard for her interests and her safety and feelings. Heck, he doesn't even have enough of those sorts of feelings to speak to her gently and with tact and respect.

The doll's dressmaker was also mis-cast. She should have been much younger -- she's barely out of childhood in the book, and also has long blonde hair, which she does not here. In the book she is very SHARP in her manner. In this BBC production, she is merely abusive. It's not the same.

And this brings me to what I see as THE major fault with this production: wherever there is a change, or an alteration of Dickens' dialogue, it is always in the direction of a greater coarseness of speech and of feeling. One must remember that whatever the faults of the age, it was also one that produced men like Dickens and Browning, and where if there was much lip-service to religious practice there was also much genuine religious and moral feeling. (Note, in the latter connections that Lizzie PRAYS while carrying out the rescue, as she barely does in the BBC version -- just about.) The instinct of the BBC, unfortunately, seems to be to take a hatchet to 19th-century manners and dialogue and move everything towards a tone reminiscent of its own rather coarse contemporary soap-operas.

Bella suffers much in this connection. Several rather aggressive speeches that aren't in the book are given to her by the BBC. What, in the book, is a proposal of marriage from John Harmon (as Rokesmith) is made here into an interview instigated by her -- a dressing-down delivered, on account of his "watching her". The delicacy and tact of Harmon in this scene are also lost. The BBC make him far more less restrained and thoughtful for her and far more florid and insistent.

And here is Bella reproaching Mr. Boffin in the book:

"I hate you!" cried Bella, turning suddenly upon him, with a stamp of her little foot--"at least, I can't hate you, but I don't like you!" ...

In the film she merely says "I hate you". This is far coarser. In the book she's at one and the same time furious but aware of what she owes for past kindness and affection (not money nor social position, which loom in the book in several unpleasant ways throughout). So there's a kind of see-sawing. It's very fresh and direct, appealing, and also very funny.

Enough.

It's worth buying and watching this. What's been omitted from the book probably needed to go to make the material of manageable size. I think the choices were intelligent here -- why not, for example, drop the character of the money-lender and make his employee, Mr. Riah, the girls' teacher instead? These sorts of decisions were intelligently made. What I do find hard to forgive is where the BBC has mangled Dickens' dialogue -- has thought it knew better than the great man. But Dickens, after all, knew how 19th-century people thought and spoke and behaved. HE WAS THERE!

There are a few further oddities. For example, a vast army of people is constantly shown sifting the dust heaps, whereas the point is that there is NOTHING in the heaps. If there ever had been anything in the heaps it had been sifted out years ago. This is why Wegg's miscalculations in this connection are so futile. And again, why is a 19th-century Church of England clergyman (Mr. Frank Milvey) shown conducting the marriage service in Latin? This is just bizarre. The Book of Common Prayer, which is in English, had been around since 1662! Our Mutual Friend is set in the 19th century not the Middle Ages.

Finally, the atmosphere is a little too gloomy. To be sure, the book has the attempted murder of John Harmon (which, however, occurs before the action of the book starts). It also has the attempted murder of Eugene Wrayburn by the vile Bradley Headstone: but then this too is unsuccessful.

The book is basically a comedy. it is the story of how a misanthrope's plans for making everyone miserable -- the elder Harmon's -- backfire so that everything instead comes out right. That's a happy outcome on an almost cosmic scale. The elder Harmon even tries to tie his son's fortunes to the marriage to Bella, having seen her misbehaving as a small girl and, presumably, thinking to saddle him with a spoilt and irritating wife. However, she turns out, as it were by a kind of divine joke, to be just the woman John Harmon would have chosen above any had his choice been totally unconstrained -- and worth the deepest and most generous feelings any man would be capable of finding in himself besides. The book is also a comedy in the more familiar sense -- that it is just very funny. I think the "dark" side comes through too much in the adaptation and the comic side not enough.

However, when all's said and done, this adaptation is probably about the best that could be hoped for under current circumstances.