Anglophiles rejoice. "Parade's End" is about to begin and upper lips have never been more stiff, accents more clipped nor pure hearts more tortured.
HBO's five-hour adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's masterwork examination of the delusion, repression, nobility and romance of the British spirit is lush, a bit maddening and ? after formal introductions are made ? thoroughly addicting. Written by Tom Stoppard ("Shakespeare in Love") and directed by Susanna White with a bit too much fondness for mirrors, this mammoth undertaking set in the years prior to World War I deals with love, war, class and desperate personalities.
At its center is a brilliant if stubbornly proper aristocrat, Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch), who gets suckered into marrying a saucy socialite, Sylvia (Rebecca Hall), who is pregnant with a child that may or may not be his. Soon enough, Sylvia runs off to France for a fling with another man while Christopher quietly bears it.
But then he meets, and is smitten with, a lovely young suffragette, Valentine Wannop (the lovely young Adelaide Clemens). Christopher, of course, can't act on his affection ? he's a married man. And eventually Sylvia returns to her husband, dooming them both to a life of stiff cordiality at best.
This love triangle of distances continues even as Christopher goes off to war and finds hell in the trenches. The disconnect between propriety and reality keeps the miniseries on constant edge.
The entire cast is fine, but Hall steals the show. Her Sylvia is both impossibly cruel and yet somehow oddly sympathetic, a tortured creature from another time. In "Parade's End," the march of progress is both too slow and too fast for its characters to keep step.
tlong@detroitnews.com
twitter.com/toomuchTomLong
Source: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130222/ENT10/302220312/1457/ENT10
big ten tournament 2012 dennis quaid bruce weber fired notorious big biggie smalls lyrics azores emmylou harris
No comments:
Post a Comment