Andrew Davies, the Welsh-born screenwriter, has made a career out of adapting other people’s work. He has adapted Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) Shakespeare (Othello) E.M. Forster (A Room With a View) and Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary) to name just a few. He is also a big fan of Charles Dickens, and recently took on Dickens’s Little Dorrit. The production was broadcast on the BBC in 2008, recently ended a run on PBS, and is now available on DVD. Besides being a romance and mystery story, it’s also a timely and prophetic tale of bad investments and crushing debt.
Little Dorrit: One of “Charlie’s Regulars”
Amy Dorrit (called “Little Dorrit” because of her petite size, played by Claire Foy) is born in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Her mother dies in childbirth; her father (played by Tom Courtenay) is an old lag known as the king of the Marshalsea. Amy cares for her father and works outside the prison as a seamstress for Mrs. Clennam (Judy Parfitt) whose son Arthur (Matthew Macfadyen) has just returned from China.
Right away, Amy is recognizable as one of what Philadelphia Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm calls “Charlie’s regulars.” She’s not an orphan, like Pip, Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, but she’s motherless, brought up in distressing circumstances, and too good to be true. Despite her lack of education, she speaks perfect English and knows how to behave better than any of her family.
Adapting Little Dorrit: Dickens vs. Davies
Amy falls in love with Arthur, whose life has been unknowingly bound with hers since her birth. Davies changes some of the circumstances surrounding the Dorrit and Clennam families; without spoiling anything, the resolution of the mystery is a bit confusing and a major detail gets overlooked as the story rushes to its denouement. Mr. Dorrit’s prison room is much bigger and cleaner than it would have been in actuality, and Macfadyen, who is 34, is a bit too young to play the 40-year-old Arthur.
Those quibbles aside, it is an excellent production. Dickens’s characters were often larger-than-life, making them great fun for actors to play, and no one here is having more fun than Andy Serkis, playing the French murderer Rigaud. During the early episodes, it’s unclear what his purpose is, but he winds up being the motivator behind the mystery.
Foy and Macfadyen have the bad luck to be playing the “straight” people amongst all the colourful supporting characters, but both are actors with beautifully expressive faces and lovely large eyes that tell the audience exactly what Amy and Arthur are thinking.
Mr Merdle: A Victorian Madoff?
Besides being a mystery and a romance, though, Little Dorrit was a social commentary, one particularly relevant for our time. Dickens’s father spent time in a debtors’ prison, a ludicrous institution that kept people who owed money from working. These prisons may no longer exist, but many people feeling the current credit crunch will sympathize with the Dorrits.
More presciently, though, Dickens created a proto Bernie Madoff in Mr. Merdle (Anton Lesser), an investment specialist who gets rich on a Ponzi scheme and consequently ruins the lives of many of the characters.
The DVD contains a bonus feature called “Little Dorrit – an Insight” which includes interviews with Davies, many of the actors, the producers and directors, as well as a history of the Marshalsea and information about Dickens. More comparisons between the book and film, which were available on the PBS Masterpiece Classics web site, would have been a nice addition, but it’s an interesting piece nonetheless, and a good addition to a lovely adaptation.
