The dramatization of an established classic is an English commonplace. I remember as a youngster getting enormous, unexpected pleasure from a radio serialization of Trollope's The Warden. With the coming of television, there have been a number of quiet, proficient triumphs. The great nineteenth-century novels are also long novels, lending themselves to all manner of treatments and having kinship, in a limited, practical sense with the soaps in being splendid sausage-lengths of public entertainment.
If that sound a trifle philistine, it is simply a mild caution against too great a tendency to rave over the new fashion in literacy conversions, which began when Nicholas Nickelby opened at Britain's National Theatre and then moved on to shake Broadway--a fashion that continues with the two-part, six-hour version of Little Dorrit.
Raves, however, are hard to avoid. Christine Edzard, who wrote and directed Little Dorrit, settled herself and her hoard of English and Irish actors into a corner of Rotherhithe in London's East End, whose very brickwork speaks of the 1790s. From there, shooting early in the day, she has conjured up Bleeding Heart Yard, the Marshalsea Prison, and a London thoroughfare; housed Daniel Doyce's engine plant; and marvelously created the paradisal gardens of Mr. Meagles.
Bleeding Heart Yard
Little Dorrit is late Dickens--"one of the very greatest of novels," according to the distinguished critic F.R. Leavis. The work is heavy with Dickens' sense of oppression and the haplessness of the losers. He is savage in his denunciation of the great folk, of new money vaunting itself, and of Establishment figures managing to condescend and cringe at the same time. The novel also constitutes in its description of the Circumlocution Office a flailing series of blows against the torpid, incompetent cruelty of bureaucracy. This is something that director Edzard brings off with a surrealistic scene of a mountain of seething documents tied in red tape imploding on itself and collapsing. Dickens had a weakness for violent and bizarre metaphor--witness the spontaneous combustion of Krook in Bleak House and the physical collapse of Mr. Clennam's house in Little Dorrit. Film is able, for straightforward technical reasons, to snatch such notions flaming off the page and make them burn on screen.
A great deal of time could be spent scouring this version for contemporary political messages. Edzard simply seeks to be faithful to the candid emotional rhetoric of Dickens, a good nineteenth-century radical who hated all abusers of power and systems of hierarchy.
George Orwell rightly categorized Dickens' face as expressing "a free intelligence at odds with all the smelly little isms now [1938] contending for our souls." The film Little Dorrit is as true to Orwell's comment as it is to Dickens' unsophisticated tenderness and sentimentality, to his affection for little, put-upon people like the Chiverings. Like Dickens himself, the film is an ungodly jumble: The strength of Charles Dickens never came from his narrative line or superfine psychology. What gives life to his novels are his characters, strongly drawn almost to the point of caricature, the vehement moral authority behind the writing, and the certainty of violent, vigorous conflict in which the author takes sides. Satire and sentiment hold joint
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