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I can't say how closely the film follows the novel, never having read the book, but since this clocks in at some six and a half hours it's a good bet that most of the base are covered or, at least, we can say with some certainty that this isn't a Reader's Digest condensed version.
The production values are high, well up to the standards of other BBC classic series like Inspector Morse and Sherlock Holmes. We can believe Dickens' London looked, sounded, and thought a lot like this. There are some occasional minor lapses -- some sportsman firing a pistol with a percussion cap in 1840 or 1820 or whenever this took place.
The acting too is to be applauded. Suzanne Burden is the polite and honest heroine who quietly goes about doing good. She's cute too, in a mature way, her beauty in her compassionate nature not in any flirtatiousness. Denholm Elliott is her guardian (and more than that, as it turns out). Burden and Elliott are two of the very few characters who are good in an unalloyed way. Another is a former sergeant forced to do evil by evil people. Another is a poor and helpless young boy.
I don't think anyone else could have written this. It's got all the earmarks of Dickens -- poverty, tragic deaths, capitalism in the raw, the generous rich guy in his gated home, hidden parentage, shadowy motives, and the impotence or outright maliciousness of the justice system. Well, not the justice system as a whole but the chancery, which was evidently a court that decided matters having to do with the distribution of property. (So I gather from Wikipedia.) It became so notoriously rigid and dilatory that it was thoroughly revamped in England in 1973. Twice, Elliott's character describes it as "a curse." The most impressive scene involves a money-scrounging creditor hounding a retired soldier in the latter's gymnasium during a fencing lesson. The sergeant is more masculine in the traditional sense than any other male character I remember from Dickens. The apoplectic money lender and renter is screaming threats from his seat and the sergeant turns towards him and does one delicate exercise with the saber after another, each advancement bringing him closer to his tormentor, while the scarlet-faced old creditor shrinks back into his seat.
A couple of things are missing. Often Dickens will stick in at least one or two amusing lines of dialog. ("Humbug!" or "The law is a ass.") Not here. "Bleak" house is the right title. Second, there are practically no Weberian "ideal types" -- no Mr. Micawbers or Artful Dodgers or Scrooges. Third, the atmosphere, the whole ethos, is relentlessly dismal. One tribulation follows another, usually having to do with money or some shameful peccadillo out of the past.
My God, it's depressing. It's as if the author were venting his spleen on everything he hated in the world he knew. Poverty, okay. He KNEW poverty. But one wonders what the chancery did to Dickens to deserve this kind of treatment.
Maybe I should add that I've just watched the first episode of the 2005 series -- and it's better in two ways. There is more zip in the direction, so the pace is a little faster. And the business of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce is explained satisfactorily right up front, instead of lurking about in the shadows as that mysterious "curse," so the plot is easier to follow.


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