The Artful Dodger, on Hulu

In England, their lives were Dickensian, literally. Jack Dawkins is still an ex-convict, but who isn’t, in 19^th Century Australia? Now he is a man of medicine, but Fagin will always be a scheming slimeball. Dawkins knows that, but he opts to keep the cad close in creators James McNamara, David Maher, and David Taylor’s eight-part Oliver Twist sequel series, The Artful Dodger, which premieres tomorrow on Hulu.

Dawkins, a.k.a. “The Artful Dodger,” is now a surgeon, but in the wild and wooly colony of Australia, he still must live by his wits to earn money. Unfortunately, he owes 26 Pounds to a cheating card-sharp gangster, who aims to collect either the money or his hand. Fagin arrives just in time to suggest several dodgy capers, all of which inevitably lead to more trouble.

Nevertheless, Dawkins is a reasonably talented and conscientious medical man, thanks to his late, redeeming master. In fact, the clueless governor’s headstrong eldest daughter, Lady Belle Fox wants him to be her mentor her in surgical medicine. Even in Australia, medicine is not considered a proper pursuit for a lady, but Fox is not very traditional and the reluctant Dawkins does not strike her that way either.

McNamara, Maher, Taylor, and their fellow writers do a nice job inserting Dawkins and Fagin into new picaresque misadventures. They also remain mindful of all their awkward shared history from Oliver Twist. Ironically, Dickens’s sympathetic title orphan is often referred to as a double-crossing villain throughout Artful Dodger. However, Fox’s constant attempts to enlist Dawkins in her crusades for gender equality and medical modernization grow tiresome. Of course, she is totally right and the backwards Colony establishment are invariably fools and knaves. We have heard this sort of bickering so many times before, it just feels shopworn here.

NYFF ’16: Genre Shorts

It is generally accepted as fact psycho-stalkers are always scarier when they are German, but cult leaders are still creepy even when they are woolen-wearing British matrons. Prepare to have your suspicions reconfirmed when the 54th New York Film Festival takes horror and dark thrillers international—and also succinctly to the point—with Shorts Program 3: Genre Stories, which screens tonight as part of the fest.

Charles Dickens’ supernatural yarn The Signalman has not been filmed very often. The last time was probably a 1970s BBC Christmas special starring Denholm Elliott (Yuletide ghost stories are a big deal over there). However, Daniel Augusto still assumes everyone knows the story, because he dispenses with the narrator character (who would otherwise explain what is going on) and mostly implies rather than shows the events of the story. Still, it is an undeniably moody and evocative piece, lightyears more enjoyable than his recent feature, Paulo Coelho’s Best Story.

Things get seriously serious with Johannes Kizler & Nik Sentenza’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You. Yes, there is a slasher home invasion film at NYFF, so sit up and pay attention. Basically, Eyes Off plays like the prologue to a Scream movie, but those are always the most memorable sequences. A mother and teenage daughter are arguing over her absentee father, but they are not alone in their tony modernist McMansion. Things proceed exactly as they always do, but you have to give Kizler & Sentenza credit for their slick, tight, tense, and brutally effective execution.

People die all the time in Jack Burke’s New Gods, but it is really more of a cult-themed psychological drama than a horror film. Still, you really wouldn’t want to be there either. Rosemary looks like a high school art teacher, but she rigidly commands the agrarian collective known simply as “The Community.” That means no medicine for those who are sick. They are to simply make their peace and shuffle off, unless you happen to be especially useful to Rosemary. In that case, exceptions can be made. Unfortunately, the hard toiling Sophie is running a fever, but she has no special skills. The premise and climax of New Gods could most likely sustain a feature length treatment, but Burke’s remarkably economical narrative feels fully rendered and satisfactorily self-contained in its current short subject format.

Evidently, in Luxembourg, they have a baby-tooth hoarding mouse instead of the Tooth Fairy. We’re much better off than the Benelux nation, as a grown fanboy dad and his son will learn when they come face to whiskered-face with the ferocious rodent in Pascal Thiebaux & Gil Pinheiro’s Pearlies. While cleaning out the late grandmother’s flat, father and son inadvertently cause the loss of one of the mean little creature’s prized teeth, so he will take a replacement the hard way. With its richly detailed sets and over-the-top dark humor, Pearlies has the look and vibe of early Tim Burton or early Sam Raimi, making it quite a macabrely amusing confection.

The ringer of the programming block is also a real downer. After enjoying all the previous genre goodness, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s What Happened to Her sets out to guilt trip horror and police procedural fans by rubbing their noses in images of naked women corpses, as seen in films and TV shows. Of course, viewers are not supposed to enjoy those images. Rather, they are priming us for future payback.  It is sort of like That’s Entertainment for floating bodies, but instead of music we hear a voice-over interview with a former extra who found her corpse portrayal physically uncomfortable and emotionally demeaning. It is might have been an unpleasant gig, but it is hard to see it haunting her, like more conventionally explicit sex scenes. Regardless, it is almost perversely amusing to see the axe-grinding docu-supercut sharing the bill with Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.

Indeed, the shorts preceding Happened mostly celebrate the tradition of genre filmmaking in rather entertaining ways. As a result, Shorts Program 3: Genre Stories is quite a mixed bag, but it is front loaded with enough reputable and guilty pleasures to earn a recommendation for horror and dark thriller fans when it screen tonight (10/1) and Monday night (10/3), as part of this year’s NYFF.

The Invisible Woman: That Scandalous Dickens

Her actress-sister Frances eventually became Anthony Trollope’s sister-in-law.  For her part, Ellen Ternan had a much closer relationship with Charles Dickens, but she was infamously not his wife.  Ralph Fiennes brings their not-so secret affair to the screen as the director and star of The Invisible Woman (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Dickens was a genuine literary celebrity—the Stephen King of his era.  He even wrote serialized novels too.  Dickens also had ten children from his plain, unassuming wife, Catherine. As the Dickenses grow increasingly distant, it is not terribly surprising the novelist will eventually succumb to temptation with one of his many admirers.  That will be Ellen “Nelly” Ternan.

By all accounts, Ternan was a middling actress at best, but she still caught Dickens’ eye in a production of The Frozen Deep, his quasi-collaboration with Wilkie Collins.  Dickens quickly becomes a patron to the Ternan family, including her mother and two sisters, all of whom are considered better thespians than Ellen.  Of course, Mrs. Ternan is no fool, but she understands the limits of her daughter’s options. 

Nevertheless, this is still Victorian England, when scandal meant something.  To play the part of Dickens’ mistress, Ternan will have to assume the titular invisibility.  Even if she wanted to, she is incapable of flaunting social norms, like Collins and his lover.  Regardless, the truth is bound to come out sooner or later, or else Fiennes’ film would never exist.

So here it is, somewhat more preoccupied with societal conventions and class distinctions than a typical installment of PBS’s Masterpiece, but not too very far removed stylistically.  It is hardly an apology for Dickens, but Fiennes’ lead performance is easily the best thing going for it.  He rather brilliantly expresses the passion and recklessness lurking beneath his almost painful reserve.  Unfortunately, it is sort of like watching one hand clap during his scenes with Felicity Jones’ Ternan. When Fiennes is quietly intense, she is just quiet.

Frankly, Invisible must stack the deck against Dickens’ poor, anti-trophy wife to sell his attraction to the pale, mousy Ternan.  Maybe we just don’t get Jones here, but it seems like most red blooded scribblers would be more interested in Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant and sultry Mrs. Ternan.  Regardless, Joanna Scanlon’s subverts the intended sabotage of her character, investing the real Mrs. Dickens with excruciating dignity and humility.

Certainly presentable by general British costume drama standards, The Invisible Woman is more distinguished by Fiennes’ turn as an actor than a director.  There is also plenty of fine work from Thomas, Scanlon, and Tom Hollander as Collins, but the central chemistry is lacking. Recommended mostly just for voracious Victorian readers, it opens Christmas Day in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

Dro-oo-od on Broadway

They are not booing, they are chanting “Drood.”  Spectators are immediately asked to join in and hold that “o” whenever the title character is mentioned on-stage.  Incorporating audience participation in the tradition of Rand’s Night of January 16^th, patrons will decide who the issue of guilt, but nobody is really innocent in the Roundabout Theater Company’s randy revival of Rupert Holmes’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, now running on Broadway (promo here).

Staged as the latest production of a Victorian theater company, the first act more or less follows Dickens’ unfinished novel and previous Masterpiece and Universal adaptations.  Dro-oo-od is the entitled orphan nephew of his guardian, John Jasper, a secretly drug-addicted provincial choirmaster.  Jasper is not so furtively obsessed with Rosa Bud, who was betrothed to Dro-oo-od in their childhoods.  To deal with his ghosts, Jasper frequents the London opium den operated by the Princess Puffer, a mere old crone in most renditions, elevated in stature on-stage to accommodate a Broadway diva like Chita Rivera, or in the case of the Roundabout’s revival, exactly like Rivera.

Before long, Dro-oo-od will disappear and suspicion will fall on his newly arrived rival, Neville Landless.  However, theater company chairman William Cartwright, serving as master of ceremonies and reluctantly stepping into the role of Mayor Sapsea, will give the audience a chance to “elect” the murderer for the evening, whether their choice makes sense or not.

With its meta-play-within-a-play concept, Drood the musical is not unlike the recently hyped Anna Karenina.  Yet, the device works better here, probably because nobody takes it very seriously.  Arguably, Holmes’ gimmick was also more original when it debuted on Broadway in 1985, the same year Oliveira’s Satin Slipper was released.

In truth, Drood the musical can never harbor many pretensions, aside from expressing a bit of Dickens love, which is jolly fair enough.  It is simply a chance for the cast to unleash their inner mustache-twisting villains and vamps.  Jim Norton, the distinguished co-star of many Conor McPherson Broadway productions and his exceptional film The Eclipse, combines ham with dry wit to excellent effect as the Chairman.  The Princess Puffer is not a natural fit for Rivera, but at least it is a chance to see the Broadway superstar in her element.  Nor can the pleasure of the unapologetically colorful turns from Will Chase as the dastardly Jasper and Jessie Mueller as Landless’s femme fatale twin be denied.

Ironically, the weak link of the musical Drood are Holmes not particularly memorable tunes.  Still, “Perfect Strangers” is an appealing enough love song.  However, the second act reprise became truly high farce last Saturday, due to eccentric choices made by the audience that would take too long to explain.  (Evidently, the Devil really gets into New Yorkers during the holidays.)

Appropriately returning to Broadway during the Dickens bicentennial, the hard-working, highly likable Drood represents a fresh holiday alternative to yet another Christmas Carol.  The audience outreach is clever without becoming intrusive (unless you’re asking for it in the front row) and the performances are uniformly energetic.  Recommended for those who enjoy broad musical comedy with a literary veneer, The Mystery of Edwin Drood runs on Broadway until March 10^th at the Studio 54.

Dickens at MoMA: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Ned is dead—apparently.  Unfortunately, his creator, Charles Dickens, also died before he could reveal both the location of young Drood’s body and the identity of his murderer.  It has become a literary guessing game performed on stage and screen, including the current Broadway revival and a BBC production recently seen on Masterpiece Mystery.  Somewhat underappreciated, Stuart Walker’s 1935 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood kicks off MoMA’s Dickens on Film series tomorrow, in celebration of the Dickens centennial.

John Jasper seems to be a mild mannered provincial choirmaster, but he knows his way about London’s opium dens.  He is a profoundly flawed man, but his affection for his ward, Edwin (or Ned) Drood, is genuine.  He also harbors a darkly consuming love for Rosa Bud, the young man’s intended.  It was a Dickensian engagement negotiated by their late fathers and subsequently nurtured by their guardians, Jasper and solicitor Hiram Grewgious.  In addition to Jasper’s unwelcome attentions, fiery new arrival Neville Landless also falls for Bud, hard.  Pretty much the only one not hopelessly smitten with her is Drood, which leads to all kinds of hard feelings.  Then one dark and stormy night, Drood disappears under mysterious circumstances. 

Suspicion in the village naturally falls on Landless, the aptly named Christian orphan from Ceylon, but Dickens left plenty of evidence to incriminate Jasper with readers.  Of course, the whole question of habeas corpus is key to mystery.  Walker and a platoon of screenwriters provide a reasonably workable answer to that riddle. 

However, it is a bit surprising Walker and company do not play up the gothic elements more, especially considering the 1935 Drood came out during the golden age of Universal horror movies and features several of their franchise stars, including first and foremost Claude Rains, the original Invisible Man and Larry Talbot’s father in the first Wolfman.  Exceeding expectations, David Manners (the bland protagonist of Dracula and The Mummy) excels at the entitled attitude and drunken misbehavior of the ill-fated title character, while E.E. Clive (the Burgomaster in Bride of Frankenstein) plays another ineffectual local authority as Mayor Sapsea.

While there are many perfectly nice supporting turns in the 1935 Drood, it is unquestionably Rains’ picture.  His Jasper is definitely a brooder in the Invisible Man tradition rather than the continental smoothy of Casablanca.  Watching him leer at Bud and drug himself into oblivion is quite good fun.  Recommended for fans of Dickens and Rains, The Mystery of Edwin Drood screens tomorrow (12/20) and Saturday (12/22) as part of Dickens on Film at MoMA.

Dickens Bicentennial: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

John Jasper might be the most murderous choirmaster in English literature. We cannot be sure though, because Charles Dickens died before he could finish his final novel. What he left certainly led readers to suspect Jasper had nefariously dispatched his beloved nephew Ned Drood, known to rest of his acquaintances as Edwin. As part of their celebration of Dickens’ 200th birthday, PBS’s Masterpiece airs a new adaptation of the mystery-shrouded mystery, featuring a brand new ending that should please both Classic and Mystery viewers alike when The Mystery of Edwin Drood airs this coming Sunday (promo here).

Jasper is a haunted man, who seeks solace in London’s opium dens. He adores his nephew Drood, but harbors a dark and consuming love for the chap’s fiancée, Rosa Bud. Their engagement was negotiated by their late fathers and subsequently nurtured by their guardians, Jasper and solicitor Hiram Grewgious. It has been a convenient arrangement for Drood, freeing him up to think about other matters, but Bud is plagued by doubts. However, her prospective betrothal offers some protection against the unwanted attentions of her music teacher, John Jasper.

Events proceed on course, regardless of the hidden anxieties festering in the provincial cathedral village, until the arrival of the aptly named Landless twins, two Christian orphans from Ceylon, whose education is to be supervised by Jasper’s colleague, the Reverend Crisparkle. Suddenly, Bud has a confidant in Helena and Drood has a rival in Neville. Naturally, the two young men instantly clash. Yet, just when they have apparently buried the hatchet, Drood disappears under suspicious circumstances.

This is about the point in which Gwyneth Hughes shifts from screen-adapter to Dickens channeler. She shrewdly incorporates many of the clues dropped in the first act, but adds a whole mess of dark Drood family history that might be wholly original, but is certainly in keeping with the literary spirit of the time. She fits the third act revelations together quite convincingly, but she gives Mr. Tartar the hook, even though many Dickens scholars thought he was to factor prominently in the conclusion.

Jasper might have been one of the great Byronic anti-heroes in literature. He is often seen as a tragic, but strangely sympathetic figure, despite his ferocity. Indeed, Hughes eventually posits a backstory that helps explain his brooding nature. In a role previously filled by Claude Rains and Robert Powell, Welsh actor Matthew Rhys has a suitably dark, glowering look and presence, while still expressing all of Jasper’s doubts and self-loathing.

Conversely, the bland Freddie Fox’s Drood is a bit of a young twit, but that rather works in the dramatic context of Hughes’ adaptation. Tamzin Maerchant (of The Tudors) looks like an even younger and paler Jessica Chastain as Bud, but she handles the distressed heroine duties in a suitably Victorian manner. Rory Kinnear (Bond buddy Bill Tanner in 007 reboots) is particularly notable amid the supporting cast, expressing the fundamental Christian decency of Rev. Crisparkle in one of the more refreshingly positive television portrayals of a clergyman in recent years.

Director Diarmuid Lawrence wisely emphasizes the genre elements, heightening the mystery with evocative scenes of Jasper’s opiate-fueled hallucinations. A satisfying shot at completing the unfinished literary puzzle, the feature length Drood represents Masterpiece’s sixteenth Dickens production overall and a fitting way to observe the Dickens bicentenary this season. It airs this Sunday (4/15) on most PBS outlets nationwide.

Dickens Bicentennial: Great Expectations

Just in time for Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday, the BFI discovered what is thought to be the earliest Dickens silent film: G.A. Smith’s The Death of Poor Joe, circa 1901, depicting a brief scene from Oliver Twist. Over one hundred years later, the Dickens canon is still a source of inspiration for both cinema and television. PBS’s Masterpiece Classic celebrates the Dickens Centennial with two new (at least for American audiences) productions, starting this Sunday with Great Expectations (promo here).

Phillip Pirrip is simply known as Pip. It is not just a nickname. It will become his identity. As a young orphan, Pip encounters Abel Magwitch on the moors. Though terrified, the lad helps the escaped convict, at the risk of incurring his guardian older sister’s wrath. Shortly after Magwitch’s capture, Pip is enlisted to serve as the companion to Estella Havisham, the adopted daughter of Miss Havisham, a mysterious spinster with a tragic past.

His trips to Miss Havisham’s Satis House are strange affairs, but they lead Pip to believe her interest will raise him out of his mean station. Yet, as soon as his hopes are raised, his would be patroness arbitrarily dashes them. However, when a mysterious benefactor arranges for Pip to live the life of a gentleman in London and assume a considerable fortune upon reaching legal adulthood, Pip assumes he is back in the Havishams’ good graces.

Yes, this is definitely Great Expectations (Masterpiece’s second adaptation as it happens, and fifteenth Dickens work overall), following the source novel quite scrupulously. The only question is which ending screenwriter Sarah Phelps chose: the more cinematic and canonical upbeat ending or Dickens’ original conclusion favored by critics such as George Orwell.

In fact, her treatment nicely captures the spirit of the great novel, well establishing the major supporting characters so viewers can fully appreciate the significance when they reappear in different contexts. Perhaps most importantly, she and director Brian Kirk devote sufficient time to Pip’s relationship with Herbert Pocket, his onetime rival turned intimate friend. In a way, their friendship proves people can change for the better, which is one of the novel’s central questions.

Expectations should also interest Game of Thrones fans, featuring three alumni: Kirk at the helm, Mark Addy as the blowhard Mr. Pumblechook and Harry Lloyd engagingly earnest as Pocket (a complete departure from the entitled Viserys Targaryen). However, much of the attention will center on Gillian Anderson as a decidedly younger, but rather spooky Miss Havisham. Indeed, her portrayal of an emotional stunted woman almost literally haunted by her past, as well as Kirk’s embrace of the story’s gothic elements, should appeal to genre viewers.

Always reliable, Ray Winstone is perfectly cast as Magwitch, projecting the appropriate ferocity and sensitivity, depending on the circumstances. Masterpiece regular David Suchet also adds a dash of roguish flavor as Mr. Jaggers, the solicitor administering Pip’s trust. Unfortunately, the charisma and chemistry of romantic leads Douglas Booth and Vanessa Kirby is somewhat lacking, but as with most good Dickens productions, Expectations can be easily enjoyed for the secondary characters.

Great Expectations is solidly entertaining television, even if the tragic love story fizzles somewhat. Unequally divided into one and two hour installments, it is freely recommended for its meaty supporting turns and rich period trappings when it premieres on most PBS outlets this Sunday (4/1), concluding a week later (4/8), as part of the current season of Masterpiece.