Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 7, 1994 TAG: 9404070301
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The six-part adaptation of George Eliot's 1872 novel begins with a 90-minute chapter on Sunday night (on WBRA-Channel 15). From the outset, one can see this is a spectacular production, rich in period details but also rich in character and content. It's a story of thwarted ideals and twisted fates that Eliot might have called not ``Great Expectations,'' since that title had been used, but ``Best Intentions.''
Eliot was, of course, a woman - Mary Ann Evans - and best known for having written ``Silas Marner,'' a book that's a bane of many a high school student's existence. ``Middlemarch'' became a huge best seller again in England when the miniseries was shown there, to enormous popular acclaim, in January.
One thing that runs through ``Middlemarch'' is a persuasive 19th-century feminism. The female characters are the most intriguing and yet are often underappreciated or dismissed by the men who hold sway in Victorian society.
Dorothea Brooke, played hauntingly by Juliet Aubrey, is the most memorable and impressive, an intelligent young woman of heady ideals and ambitions who in the first chapter marries the Rev. Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide) because she admires what appears to be his cavernous mind. It turns out to be cold as a cavern if hardly as vast.
And Casaubon proves a pompous dilettante who looks upon Dorothea as a pupil to be instructed. His idea of a honeymoon in Rome is to strut through galleries and museums pontificating to his young wife on the subjects of art and antiquity.
As the film begins, another idealist is arriving in the provincial village of Middlemarch: Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge), a young doctor whose lofty plans to build a modern hospital and medical school blind him to some of the ugly practicalities of local politics. He is sternly lectured on the latter by Nicholas Bulstrode (Peter Jeffrey), a powerful and corrupt banker who has the whole town by the pound notes.
Interacting with these characters are such other locals as Fred and Rosamond Vincy (Jonathan Firth and Trevyn McDowell), son and daughter of the mayor. Fred has his eye on the inheritance to be left him by his long-dying and miserly uncle Peter (Michael Hordern, quite funny); Rosamond has her eye on Dr. Lydgate.
It is the 1830s and the Industrial Revolution is well under way, symbolized in one of the earliest scenes by a pitch-black locomotive carrying machines to workers who toil near its tracks. You don't have to read a great deal into the story to find it relevant to other changing times, like today's, with the computer revolution reordering the world yet again and with women still struggling for equality.
As is usual with BBC-made dramas, this one, produced at a cost of more than $10 million, is engrossingly well-acted and faithfully adapted from the novel (by Andrew Davies). One difference between American costume dramas and British costume dramas is that in the British ones, the actors actually look comfortable in the costumes.
They're comfortable in their roles, too, making the characters alive and indelible. One quickly gets caught up in these little lives and big dreams, the lives that crisscross and the dreams doomed to be dashed. Dorothea Brooke wishes aloud for ``some great purpose in my life which will give it shape and meaning,'' a universal yearning especially poignant for a woman of her era.
Like the greatest fiction, ``Middlemarch'' soon stops seeming like fiction at all and more like a painfully observant study of real people who really existed. Sometimes ``Masterpiece Theater'' is thought of as quaint and stuffy, but ``Middlemarch'' avoids that curse completely; it is a work of wit and humor and relevance, and sumptuously entertaining besides.
Tom Shales is a Washington Post television columnist.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB