Middlemarch (1994)

After reading George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, I decided to watch the BBC miniseries, released in 1994. The series was a huge hit in England, where it launched a Middlemarch craze, propelling the book to number on the best seller lists, and the filming location became a tourist site. In six parts, and a little over six hours, the series is quite faithful to the book.

I won't go to great lengths to recap the plot, as it is in my review of the book. Though six hours, it trims the novel to something of its bare bones. It was fascinating to see actors take the role I had imagined in my mind. Most interesting to me was seeing Casaubon, the pedantic scholar, played by Patrick Malahide as a somewhat cadaverous introvert (he looks a little like Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show). It's a wonder he was part of society at all, given the actor's displaying a repulsion to contact with other people.

The other performers seemed right--Juliet Aubrey, who won a BAFTA award for Best Actress, is perfect as Dorothea, who burns to good with her life, but ultimately finds failure. The same is said for David Hodge as Lydgate. In fact, the crushing of these two characters is more keen in the film than in the book. Failure is a strong word--Dorothea ends up marrying her true love, Ladislaw (played smolderingly by Rufus Sewell), while Hodge finds a kind of peace with his wife Rosamund (Trevyn McDowell), but both have their ultimate ambitions unfulfilled. After reading the book I was left with an uplifted spirit, since it ends with the union of Fred Vincy (Jonathan Firth) and Mary Garth (Rachel Power, perfectly cast).

There are other terrific performances: veteran Shakespearean actor Michael Hordern makes a very cranky Featherstone (it was his last television role), and Robert Hardy brings out the ditheriness in Uncle Brooke. Peter Jeffery manages to bring out the full humanity in the otherwise villainous Bulstrode, and John Savident makes a properly repulsive Raffles, with what I hope are dental prosthetics of a ghastly kind.

Overall I found the series dutiful but soggy--it has a kind of decorum that kept it from really plumbing emotional depths. The direction by Anthony Page was reverent but sedate, the screenplay by Andrew Davies witty but tempered. I liked how the gossips of the town acted as kind of a chorus, but the ending felt curiously anticlimactic. The ending of the book is seen by many as unhappy but realistic, more complex than the usual endings of the day. The series uses the same words as the novel: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”