[Hardy-l] Re: Tess on PBS

[Niemeyer, Paul J.]

Rosemarie Morgan on December 30 asked for opinions from Hardyans on the recent *Tess of the d'Urbervilles* miniseries starring Gemma Arterton.  The first two parts aired this evening on *Masterpiece Classics* (RIP *Masterpiece Theatre*), and I thought I'd offer my views on the serial so far.
 
One of the startling things is how different this new *Tess* looks from its predecessors.  Polanski's wonderful 1979 film is iconic and Ian Sharp's 1998 miniseries blunders by trying to copy Polanski's look.  Director David Blair avoids any comparison to the earlier films, largely because he tries to make everything look as ordinary as possible.  The Durbeyfields don't live in Dickensian squalor and Talbothay's dairy isn't the site of Wordsworthian communion between man and land; the places are functional and believable.  And, though the photography is beautiful, it doesn't turn the land into a pretty backdrop: it too is functional; people live on it and work it.
 
Blair's interest in the "ordinary" extends to the cast. While Polanski brilliantly cast grotesques and extremes of human beauty and Sharp tended toward cartoons (I still shudder at the obese Marian swinging around her bottle of liquor on the job), Blair gives us people we all know.  The three dairymaids, for instance, are all attractive, so the viewer isn't left to say, "Well, OF COURSE Angel would pick Tess--she's so much better looking than they are!"  You get the feeling that any of them would be a prize, and that Angel gravitates toward Tess because there's something "more" to her.
 
On the whole, I like Gemma Arterton's Tess, though right now she seems to be lacking a real tragic dimension (why no "blighted star" speech?).  One thing she truly brings across, though, is Tess's youth: she indeed seems like a young girl who simply did get in over her head.  That said, I'm not sure what to make of an Alec who seems to be about Tess's age.  I won't trot out the old "this isn't true to Hardy" line; but I will say that by making Alec such a callow youth he's leant a lot of undue sympathy.  The Chase scene comes across not so much as an older man taking advantage of a naive young girl but as a slightly experienced boy clumsily pushing his girlfriend too far (i.e., it's date-rape).  I'm interested to see how he'll emerge in the last two parts.
 
Other notes: there are a couple of additions to Hardy's text that I think work very well.  One is having a young man hop off the (mail?) cart and shoot the dying Prince to end his suffering.  This is nicely analogous to Tess's breaking the necks of the birds, and the focus on the smoking gun barrel is phallic is suggestive of what will befall Tess as a result of Prince's death.  I was also intrigued by a scene of Tess reciting in the school room (though perhaps "Casabianca" might be more appropriate for her to recite than "Ozymandias?") and by the way the serial explores Tess's intellectual side.  That Alec would try to win Tess over by giving her free run of his father's library was genius.
 
So far, so good, I say.  I'm on the last day of my vacation in Arizona, and I watched the episodes with my father.  He got very choked up during the baptism of Sorrow, and that says a lot about the effectiveness of the serial.
 
Best,
 
Paul Niemeyer
 
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