Shake me up, indeed!

kaaber-2

Just got up from a viewing of Chadwick and White's BBC version of "Bleak House" - in one sitting. Couldn't turn it off and leave it at any time. I hardly know where to begin my praise, and I most surely do not know where to end. "Bleak House" happens to be my favourite Dickens novel, and I would have thought it impossible to make a truly successful film of this vast work on the power of goodness in a rotten world. Well, part of the key, of course, is that it runs eight hours, but the fact that it never drags, not for one minute, is not entirely Mr. Dickens' feat - the success rests by and large on the most eminent editing that I can remember to have seen. The cutting among the many stories contained in the novel is executed so skillfully that we never feel for one moment that the film takes us where we are not dying to go. The main characters are wonderfully cast, and somehow Carey Mulligan and Patrick Kennedy steer clear of turning Ada and Richard into a goody-goody and the proverbial rake. Anna Maxwell shines above all others as Esther Summerson, but hard on her heels are Charles Dance who avoids making an out-and-out villain of Tulkinghorn, Burn Gorman's wonderfully touching Guppy (extra credit to him for hitting the mark in a role that begs to be grotesquely overacted) and Harry Eden's Jo. But then again, there's not a false note in this entire production. Gillian Anderson, too, deserves mention. Not cul-de-sacked by her X-file past (in which she was brilliant, btw & imo), she delivers a marvelously restrained Lady Dedlock. Top notch acting.

I am not easy to shake up at the movies anymore, although I have occasionally experienced a lump in my throat, what with the recent fashion in tearjerkers, but I am not ashamed to confess that I cried like a flogged nun at the death of Jo the Crossing-sweep, and again at the final reunion of Esther Summerson and Lady Dedlock.

Surely, this is Dickens as he should be. I wish he could have seen it.

score /10

kaaber-2 22 March 2006

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1322040/