I may be a lone voice, but I think this Tale of Two Cities is easily the worst of the four versions I have seen and is about as bad as Dickens gets. There is almost nothing in it I can recommend.
The production design is poor. Everything and everybody is too clean and pristine. The sets of the Bastille, the wine shop and the room where Dr Manette is secreted are all too spacious. Every scene is over lit and under populated. It is the least atmospheric Dickens drama I can recall.
The writing is worse. Arthur Hopcraft jumps straight into the book as Mr Lorrie and Lucie are nearing Paris, omitting the early scenes that set up the story and some of its key characters. As a result, Miss Pross doesn't appear for over an hour. He also omits the scene on the boat where Lucie and Darnay first meet, which plays a significant role in the plot. Then he labours over the murder of the Marquis d'Evremont and other scenes set in France. The two movie versions get through the plot in about two hours, without too much simplification. Hopcraft struggles to tell the story in a more generous three hours plus.
Key aspects of the characters are underplayed or absent altogether. Miss Pross's fierce protectiveness towards Lucie only emerges slowly, as a result of her actions, rather than as their motive. We see nothing of the businesslike reserve under which Mr Lorrie hides his feelings and only get a weak sense of Dickens's deliberate contrast between Stryver's bustling self-promotion and Carton's resigned, careless self-neglect.
Philippe Monnier's direction is wretched. The staging is uniformly poor, without pace, excitement or inventiveness. For example, the bursting of the wine barrel, the storming of the Bastille and the grave-robbing scenes are all listlessly thrown away. The first trial scene is a muddled dud and the two trials in Paris are polite and uninvolved, giving little sense of how justice is being perverted by a howling mob. Mostly, Monnier just points the camera at the actors as they wander aimlessly around the sets.
Some of his decisions defy belief. When Carton coerces Barsad's aid he uses the analogy of a card game, contrasting the strength of his own cards with the weakness of Barsad's hand. This scene demands to be set in an Inn, with an actual deck of cards on hand, but we just get the two protagonists strolling in a public square.
The actors are just left to fend for themselves. For example, when Carton is approached by the seamstress in the Bastille, there is no single point at which we suddenly see her recognise his heroic deception. Where was Monnier when this scene was being botched?
The performances are universally lacklustre. Serena Gordon and Xavier Deluc are OK as Lucie and Darnay, but James Wilby's Carton is a gloomy, lovelorn moper, rather than the dissipated, self-destructive wastrel of the book. Jean-Pierre Aumont's Dr Mannette never even hints at the underlying anxiety that causes his temporary lapses into insanity, so his behaviour is even more unconvincingly schizophrenic than Dickens depicts it. It is as if Aumont never believed in the business of the cobbler's tools and said: "I'll do it if I have to, but that's what it is - 'cobblers'." John Mills just phones in his part. However, the acting depths are only finally plumbed by Karl Johnson's ineffectual, bemused-looking Barsad.
It is rare for any movie to be so bad in so many different areas simply by accident or incompetence. Usually, it is because the movie makers have consciously adopted an approach to the material which is wildly mistaken and this follows through into every aspect of the production. I suspect that is what has happened here.
Dickens wrote in very broad strokes. His characters are vivid and striking but are often one-dimensional, exemplifying a single human trait. Psychological complexity is not found in individuals so much as in the interplay between them. His plots are full of unlikely situations and improbable coincidences. More importantly, they are peppered with scenes of high emotion, in which Dickens loved to wallow - feelings he wants his readers to share. When he depicts injustice or petty malice, he wants us to be as apoplectic with rage and disgust as he is. When he depicts tragedy, he wants us to weep along with him. When he depicts good, he wants us to applaud with joy.
A Dickens novel takes us into a world of heightened reality where we are invited to laugh and cry and thrill with suspense as we wind our way through the tortuous story towards to the eventual release of a happy ending. But they are not just escapist fantasy. We pay for our simple pleasures by having to confront the urgent social and moral issues that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career.
It is this unique mix of the populist and the profound which makes Dickens different from most other great Nineteenth Century novelists.
I believe that this production is so lame because the film-makers perversely decided that they wanted the profound without the populist. They didn't want it to look or sound like any other Dickens movie, so at every point they smoothed out the eccentricities of the characters and deliberately backed away from all the emotional highlights of the story. In their hands, an exuberant melodrama becomes a sober, tepid, low-key history lesson. But in trying to keep the high-brow and discard the low-brow they end up being resolutely middle-brow.
This Tale of Two Cities is Dickens with the Dickens taken out. It dies of 'good taste'.
The production design is poor. Everything and everybody is too clean and pristine. The sets of the Bastille, the wine shop and the room where Dr Manette is secreted are all too spacious. Every scene is over lit and under populated. It is the least atmospheric Dickens drama I can recall.
The writing is worse. Arthur Hopcraft jumps straight into the book as Mr Lorrie and Lucie are nearing Paris, omitting the early scenes that set up the story and some of its key characters. As a result, Miss Pross doesn't appear for over an hour. He also omits the scene on the boat where Lucie and Darnay first meet, which plays a significant role in the plot. Then he labours over the murder of the Marquis d'Evremont and other scenes set in France. The two movie versions get through the plot in about two hours, without too much simplification. Hopcraft struggles to tell the story in a more generous three hours plus.
Key aspects of the characters are underplayed or absent altogether. Miss Pross's fierce protectiveness towards Lucie only emerges slowly, as a result of her actions, rather than as their motive. We see nothing of the businesslike reserve under which Mr Lorrie hides his feelings and only get a weak sense of Dickens's deliberate contrast between Stryver's bustling self-promotion and Carton's resigned, careless self-neglect.
Philippe Monnier's direction is wretched. The staging is uniformly poor, without pace, excitement or inventiveness. For example, the bursting of the wine barrel, the storming of the Bastille and the grave-robbing scenes are all listlessly thrown away. The first trial scene is a muddled dud and the two trials in Paris are polite and uninvolved, giving little sense of how justice is being perverted by a howling mob. Mostly, Monnier just points the camera at the actors as they wander aimlessly around the sets.
Some of his decisions defy belief. When Carton coerces Barsad's aid he uses the analogy of a card game, contrasting the strength of his own cards with the weakness of Barsad's hand. This scene demands to be set in an Inn, with an actual deck of cards on hand, but we just get the two protagonists strolling in a public square.
The actors are just left to fend for themselves. For example, when Carton is approached by the seamstress in the Bastille, there is no single point at which we suddenly see her recognise his heroic deception. Where was Monnier when this scene was being botched?
The performances are universally lacklustre. Serena Gordon and Xavier Deluc are OK as Lucie and Darnay, but James Wilby's Carton is a gloomy, lovelorn moper, rather than the dissipated, self-destructive wastrel of the book. Jean-Pierre Aumont's Dr Mannette never even hints at the underlying anxiety that causes his temporary lapses into insanity, so his behaviour is even more unconvincingly schizophrenic than Dickens depicts it. It is as if Aumont never believed in the business of the cobbler's tools and said: "I'll do it if I have to, but that's what it is - 'cobblers'." John Mills just phones in his part. However, the acting depths are only finally plumbed by Karl Johnson's ineffectual, bemused-looking Barsad.
It is rare for any movie to be so bad in so many different areas simply by accident or incompetence. Usually, it is because the movie makers have consciously adopted an approach to the material which is wildly mistaken and this follows through into every aspect of the production. I suspect that is what has happened here.
Dickens wrote in very broad strokes. His characters are vivid and striking but are often one-dimensional, exemplifying a single human trait. Psychological complexity is not found in individuals so much as in the interplay between them. His plots are full of unlikely situations and improbable coincidences. More importantly, they are peppered with scenes of high emotion, in which Dickens loved to wallow - feelings he wants his readers to share. When he depicts injustice or petty malice, he wants us to be as apoplectic with rage and disgust as he is. When he depicts tragedy, he wants us to weep along with him. When he depicts good, he wants us to applaud with joy.
A Dickens novel takes us into a world of heightened reality where we are invited to laugh and cry and thrill with suspense as we wind our way through the tortuous story towards to the eventual release of a happy ending. But they are not just escapist fantasy. We pay for our simple pleasures by having to confront the urgent social and moral issues that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career.
It is this unique mix of the populist and the profound which makes Dickens different from most other great Nineteenth Century novelists.
I believe that this production is so lame because the film-makers perversely decided that they wanted the profound without the populist. They didn't want it to look or sound like any other Dickens movie, so at every point they smoothed out the eccentricities of the characters and deliberately backed away from all the emotional highlights of the story. In their hands, an exuberant melodrama becomes a sober, tepid, low-key history lesson. But in trying to keep the high-brow and discard the low-brow they end up being resolutely middle-brow.
This Tale of Two Cities is Dickens with the Dickens taken out. It dies of 'good taste'.