Review of Silas Marner

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was one of the most interesting Victorian authors with only significant credits, while "Silas Marner" is a small changeling among an impressing lot of masterpieces - but her finest story. Ben Kingsley makes one of his finest performances and brings full justice to the heart-rending character of a vulnerable man suffering from occasional catalepsy, which results in his fate. His best friend takes advantage of it to both ruin him and steal his girl by getting him implicated in a theft and banished from town. Dishonored he becomes a miser and recluse as a weaver living alone in a cottage outside a small country town. This is where the story begins, which is a revelation of humanity and tenderness in the claws of a cruel destiny of injustice involving deaths, roguery and tragedy. The film follows the book closely and gives adorable scenery of local life in the mid 1800s, but there is one important scene in the book which you miss in the film. When Eppie is becoming a young lady, he visits his old town Lantern Yard with her and finds himself at a loss completely, Everything is changed, and the old story of the theft is never cleared. Here Silas Marner is at the heart of his tragedy, unfairly implicated and doomed for life to live under the burden of a guilt never cleared. The film is only for television and perfectly apt for that purpose and, which is most important, communicates the main contents of the tale with full bearing. It is George Eliot's most human tale with almost documentary pregnancy in its convincing honesty, which the film takes well care of.