What else are we made for?

So we did not end up watching The Red Shoes (1948) last night, because my aunt spent the evening with my grandfather; instead I showed my mother the first half of Little Dorrit (1988), which I watched originally with nineweaving almost exactly a year ago. I never posted about the film then, although I loved it; life happened and kept on happening, as it has a tendency to do. Welcome to some of the most belated notes I have ever kept about a movie. They don't make up a post, either, but seriously, some of them have been lying around my brain since last January the 26th.

I think there must be two schools of Dickens adaptation, the David Edgar and the David Lean. The first gets you Nicholas Nickleby, eight hours immersed in the teeming architecture of Dickens' world with all its quirks and walk-ons and turn-ups and sudden blaze when it all comes together; the second Great Expectations, a miraculous stripping of the narrative to its most potent symbols, tracing between them a single fine thread.¹ For the most part, Little Dorrit fits squarely into the first school.² The runtime is six hours even. (The action takes place in two parts, Nobody's Fault and Little Dorrit's Story, one for each protagonist: Arthur Clennam, Amy Dorrit. They are not identical.) IMDb credits the cast with something over two hundred named roles and Dickens knows how many extras. There is such a richness of mise-en-scène that even the quiet shots feel as live as the street scenes, the way the cinematography takes its blocking from Phiz and its palette from Vermeer and none of its faces from the twentieth century. And it is one of the most handmade films I have ever seen, down to the stitching on the characters' shoes and the dirt-glazed cobbles they tramp over—I don't think there's a single exterior shot in the entire movie, only painstakingly positioned mattes and backcloths and models, masts creaking by the Iron Bridge. The effect should be airless, stagebound. Instead it actually achieves the slightly ironic, slightly unwieldy outsize-ness of Dickens' prose: and by contrast the simply human moments stand out all the more piercingly. It works as a film, not merely a tableau vivant of the text. And it doesn't hurt that this vividly realized world is populated by such actors as Derek Jacobi, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Miriam Margolyes, and in the title role Sarah Pickering, who never seems to have made another film before or since and who achieves the astonishing feat of not being acted off the screen by any of her co-stars; I have no idea what she went on to do, but I'm glad this record remains.

Little Dorrit is also the film that got me to notice Roshan Seth, who in true character-actor fashion I turned out to have seen already in at least three other roles.³ Here he belongs to the strain of extremely unprepossessing, unexpectedly awesome that recurs in characters like Newman Noggs and Sydney Carton,⁴ playing a spiky-haired peppercorn jack-in-the-box by the name of Pancks, all pocket notebooks and bitten nails and quick-fire cross-talk, to whom we are first introduced in his capacity as collector of the rents at Bleeding Heart Yard. Conversing with him is like being thrown a handful of tacks; he's so sharp and staccato, it's anyone's guess at first whose side he's on, his serenely screw-tightening proprietor's or the tenants whose lives he makes a misery once a week: all in char-black, always at someone's elbow and gone before they can ask why, he has a look of the diabolical either way. What he turns out to be is an overworked man with a crap job and a deadpan so arid, it takes Arthur months and the audience about the subjective same to recognize his sense of humor, as canny and close to the vest as the rest of his good qualities. His favorite self-announcement is "Pancks, the Gypsy—fortune-telling." Even after he's shown himself in sympathy with Arthur, the Dorrits, and the denizens of Bleeding Heart Yard, he never settles into familiarity, unless you mean in the sense of a spirit; he goes on popping in and out of rooms with the same unsettling abruptness, the self-described "dry, uncomfortable, dreary plodder and grubber" who is no such thing. He's one of Dickens' threadbare genii, integral to the story—he has a hand in two of the most striking reversals of fortune in the narrative—and rarely center stage: and it is Roshan Seth's particular genius that he is neither too much the type-scene or a mere brisk engine of the plot.⁵

But he is a scene-stealer, as demonstrated by the fact that I am now out of time for this post. When I get back, I hope to discuss the ways in which Edzard completely undercuts her aforementioned fidelity to the novel with the film's narrative structure, because it's really cool.

1. I cannot think of many successful attempts to fall between these models, although I'll gladly take recommendations. I love Jack Conway's A Tale of Two Cities (1935) dearly, for example, but I'm also aware that it rewrites its material drastically in order to be the terrific movie that it is. The exception to both is A Christmas Carol, which being a novella fits comfortably within the runtime of a mainstream film and therefore suffers different problems in adaptation. That's another post.

2. There is one notable absence from the film: the entire thread revolving around the murderer Rigaud. I understand why Christine Edzard might have chosen to eliminate him—the havoc wreaked by a roving sociopath distracts from the quotidian evil of a society in which nothing is ever anybody's fault—but I agree it's problematic; if nothing else, it requires the redistribution of information and motives among the remaining characters in ways that do not render the denouement impenetrable, but do confuse it a little. It doesn't break the film; I had not read the book first and had no trouble following the pace of revelation. But I might really have minded had it been the other way round. In any case, the fact that the BBC's Little Dorrit (2008) retains Rigaud—and he's played by Andy Serkis—is about the only reason I would consider seeing the television version; I can't imagine liking any of the other casting better.

3. I recognized him as the advocate Amritrao from A Passage to India (1984), but he also turned out to be the groom's father in Monsoon Wedding (2001) and the secretly Kali-worshiping Prime Minister in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), for which I hope he was paid through the roof. He seems to have been acclaimed for a rare lead role in Such a Long Journey (1998), which puts it on my list. Also I should probably see My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) on general principle.

4. One of the things I have always liked about Carton is the way he's introduced nearly in parenthesis, first as "the wigged gentleman who had all this time been looking at the ceiling of the court" and later as the defense's "learned friend"; he doesn't acquire a surname until halfway through the trial and a proper name doesn't make itself known until the next chapter. There's little reason to assume from such a casual beginning that this seemingly second-rate barrister will eventually replace Charles Darnay in the role of hero; he looks as though he'll add a poignant touch of color to the supporting cast, and then before long he's the only character whose life or death you care much about. Admittedly Carton is the romantic extreme of this archetype: he is missing the element of the grotesque that characterizes Newman Noggs and Pancks, especially on the page.

5. He feels like a character Dickens was fond of, too. The scene in which he finally, spectacularly tells off his proprietor—that stately, squeezing "bottle-green smiler" Mr. Casby, who for years has been sending Pancks to be his scapegoat in the Yard—is the sort of long-burning catharsis audiences applaud, and extremely quotable.