onsdag 25 oktober 2017

The Buccaneers - costume-drama yawnfest

Perhaps it is good to be reminded that everything period-related from the Nineties - which I fondly remember as The Golden Age of costume dramas - really wasn't that great. I've recently made my way through The Buccaneers, the 1995 TV adaptation of a novel by Edith Wharton, and my goodness it was tedious. When I saw this as a teen (I must have been at least 18) I had no problem getting through it, which means that as usual I've had qualms about whether this drama is actually that bad, or whether it's just me who've become "dumbed down" or dangerously dependent on villain kicks (no villains in this one - not even of the B-list variety à la poor George Warleggan). It was the same thing when I watched Parade's End, for instance. But this time around, I didn't have that many qualms, because the drama was so clichéd it couldn't possibly contain any high-brow wisdoms which my befuddled brain may have missed.

The story is easily told. Connie, an American-Mexican girl with a rich father, marries a penniless English peer. Shortly afterwards, her three equally situated friends come and visit her for an English season. They all end up married: only one of the marriages, between the least rich girl and a self-made Englishman as cheerfully vulgar as she is, turns out happy. (One likeable thing about this drama is that it shows some sympathy for the Sir Richard Carlisles of this world.) The luckless girls who hook up with English noblemen all regret it. Connie and her husband are estranged in no time, partly because her dad won't fork out a dowry. They both play around and he gets syphilis. Virginia St George marries Lord Seadowne, who continues to hold on to his long-term mistress and makes it pretty clear from the word go that he regards his wife as a cash cow. Things become strained when her father suffers a financial set-back, then look up slightly when said father regains his fortune. Virginia's younger sister Annabelle/Nan snags the first prize from society's point of view by marrying a duke, but their marriage proves to be the most miserable of all. And all the time she's in love with a poor, handsome young man from a once-great family, determined to make his own way in the world, who shares her love of poetry.

Yes, really. I suppose there's a bit of a Tolkien problem with this plot, inasmuch as you can't be accused of using clichés if you invented them. At the time when Wharton wrote her novel, it presumably felt new and fresh when someone cast a critical look on the heiresses-for-titles trade between the nouveaux riches in the US and the old British aristocracy. That we have seen so many versions of this tale since then - and most of them a bit more nuanced - is not Wharton's fault. Still, I wonder if the novel's characterisation can really be as black and white as in this adaptation.

Consider Nan's marriage. Her husband, the Duke, essentially behaves like a boy who never properly grew up. He doesn't consummate their marriage for ages, and when he finally does he becomes violent. He belittles her and shows no interest in his tenants' woes when she nobly points them out to him. He's still under his mother's thumb (not such a bad thing because she's pretty sensible on the whole). He's a closet homosexual (which doesn't really chime in with the whole "lost boy" theme, but there we go). He won't let his sister/poor relation marry someone who's beneath her, even when it's her last chance to get married at all. He has a heavily symbolic interest in clocks: see, he can understand these machines, but not the workings of a female heart.

In contrast, Nan's love Guy makes his own fortune doing engineering work, then comes home to Give The Oppressed A Voice by going into politics. He positively reeks sensitivity, and is played by the almost aggressively good-looking Greg Wise (Willoughby in the Sense and Sensibility film with Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson - in real life he ended up with Thompson, and good for him).

Sooo, hidebound, complex-ridden childish Duke vs poetry-spouting Greg Wise? Hmm, I wonder whom we are supposed to root for here? What's remarkable is that even when the dice are as loaded as this, Nan still ends up sounding irritating as the Dowager Duchess is trying to piece together some sort of compromise while she can only go on about what she "wants" and "doesn't want". And surely the estate's steward is the right person to talk to if you have concerns about the tenants' drainage?

I have some sort of dim recollection of the novel being an unfinished one, which would explain why the TV drama ends more daringly than other repressed-high-society yarns from the same period. Guy and Nan run away publicly, and he makes a speech in Parliament about abolishing the House of Lords (!). Even if these flourishes weren't in the original, though, there's still enough to make you wonder how this could be an adaptation from a book by a prestigious, high-brow author.

Let's take the Duke's clocks as an example. My first reactions to the introduction of this theme were, predictably, "What's wrong with liking clocks?" and "I, for my part, think that hobbies which require dexterity should be encouraged in a man". Villain-fancying flippancy aside, though, there is a contrast between how the clock hobby ploy is used in Downton and The Buccaneers which isn't to the latter's advantage. The Duke's hobby is considered an oddity, while Thomas's interest in clocks in Downton is a humanising trait and something Fellowes takes the time to make understandable. Thomas being the son of a clock-maker (with whom he doesn't get on, as is later unsurprisingly revealed) and having grown up with clocks explains why he should view them as "living things" and, maybe, one of the few consolations in an otherwise frosty home environment. No grand back-story speech is needed: the information is lightly sketched in, but effective. It's not the only instance when I feel that Fellowes rather trumps The Buccaneers when it comes to characterisation - and considering that we are talking about an enjoyable middlebrow costume drama vs an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, he's not really supposed to do that.           

torsdag 19 oktober 2017

Baffling bestsellerdom

So there we are: another book I've not been able to finish. Finding Drood heavy going, I was looking for a comfort-blanket read to balance it out with and ended up testing an impulse-bought Nora Roberts novel, The Next Always. I've seen two TV adaptations of Nora Roberts books and only remember them very dimly, but I do remember liking them. One I think centred around the classic plot of three daughters and an inheritance, the other was a reincarnation story where it turned out that the hero in the contemporary romance was a reincarnation of the girl in the historical one: a sweet and funny twist. So while I was expecting a fair amount of clichés (and I'm not very sensitive when it comes to clichés in English, which is why I shamelessly use expressions like "a fair amount"), I did not expect to be bored.

Before long, I was stumped. What was going on here? I didn't really think that Roberts would turn out to be "the world's greatest storyteller" as the cover boasted, but I did assume that there would be a story of some kind. But no, not a sight of one. The novel concerns three brothers Montgomery who are renovating an atmospheric old hotel in a small American town. One of the brothers, Beckett, has his eye on Clare, a woman he's loved since they were both teenagers and who has now moved back into town, a widow with three boys. He finds her attractive. She finds him attractive. Eventually, they both twig that they're in with a chance with each other and hook up. There's zero dramatic tension: Beckett's family and Clare's friends are cheering them on from the sidelines. They belong to the same set, they're both unattached, and naturally Beckett is great with the three delightful boys. Instead of introducing any hurdles for the main romantic couple to jump over, the novel is full of pointless conversation concerning the hotel renovation. It's not even all "interior design porn" describing the various rooms, though that part of it is bad enough: we also have to read the brothers' discussions on problems with the building work and suppliers. Elsewhere they're bickering about whose turn it is to buy the pizza and beer. We follow Clare through an excruciatingly detailed account of an evening home with the boys: for pity's sake, I as a reader don't have to be there when she helps one of her sons to pee! At first I thought: "Oh well, I wanted a comfort blanket, and it doesn't get much more comfort-blankety than this". But after more than a hundred pages of meandering plotlessness I'd had enough and gave up. A Nora Roberts novel should not be the kind of book you feel you have to finish out of a sense of duty.

So what kind of genre is this anyway, and what is its appeal? I suppose it falls into the category of "quotidian cosiness". After a long row of grand epics, I myself can long for a narrative where the protagonists can consider stopping their emoting for a moment and making themselves some tea and toast. Seeing characters of a whodunnit or a contemporary romance in an everyday setting, making observations on situations that you recognise from your own life, can be very relaxing and satisfying. But there has to be more to a story than that. You can't just have tea-making scenes, or their equivalents. Roberts captures the tone of easy, everyday dialogue fairly well, but if you want to listen in on these kinds of conversations, you might as well eavesdrop on fellow visitors at a café. Here, there is no drama, and nothing at stake.

It made me wonder whether it's possible for an author to like his or her characters too much. Normally, I prefer writers who have a real affection for their characters. Roberts obviously likes the three Montgomery brothers, and their mother, and Clare, and her three boys, and her best friend. The problem is, she seems to think the readers will like them so much too that they will be happy just to hang out with them, even when not much is happening. And maybe there are a lot of readers who feel that way about the characters in The Next Always, but I wasn't one of them. The Montgomery brothers are the tousled-haired, dog-owning kind of heroes who are good at carpenting, their enthusiastically interfering mother has a sixth sense for what is best for them and the hotel, Clare's sons are charmingly boisterous, everyone gets how great small-town life is (at least everyone nice), and it's all apple-cheeked and homespun and dull.

In my despair, I've started reading The Night Watch by Sarah Waters instead, although with its gentle melancholy it's not what one could describe as a comfort blanket. It's beautifully written and precisely observed, and the characters are just likeable enough to be interested in, but not (so far) so likeable you'll end up heartbroken if things go wrong for them. I think I will actually be able to finish this one. When I will summon enough strength to get through Drood, though, is anyone's guess.      

torsdag 5 oktober 2017

Once Upon a Time season 7 wish list

Well, you were warned. Tomorrow, lucky US viewers will be able to tune into the season 7 premiere of Once Upon a Time, so I had better get my pre-season blog post out there before anyone is in a position to say "nope, that's not going to happen... and not that either". When we Swedes get to see this season of Once is anyone's guess. However, I'm hopeful that it won't be that long, and that either the obscure channel which usually sends the newest Once episodes (and which I only discovered when they were half-way into season 6, hence the long DVD wait) or Netflix will take pity on me.

I was excited about this season even before I'd seen the last one. The set-up promises to resemble the one for season 1, which I still think is the best. In season one, hard-bitten Emma Swan was visited by Henry, the boy she gave away for adoption at birth, whose mission was to take her to his home town Storybrooke and make her believe that its inhabitants were in fact fairy-tale characters living under a curse that only she could break. In this season, an adult Henry is visited by a daughter he doesn't remember, who in her turn has to convince him that fairy tales are real and that he and the most of the other inhabitants in the part of Seattle where he's living - Hyperion Heights - are victims of a new curse. Among the cursed Hyperion Heights residents are the three characters who've made it over from the original six seasons: Henry's adoptive mother Regina aka The Evil Queen from Snow White, his stepfather Captain Hook, and last but not least his grandfather Rumplestiltskin. However, the curse has given them new identities, and they don't remember who they really are, nor do they remember Henry (presumably - although with Rumple, you never know).

I really liked the original premise where the series protagonist has to be made to believe in a completely bonkers concept which then happens to turn out to be true, so I'm glad that this plot element is back, as well as the contrast between flashbacks in a fairy-tale realm and life "in the real world" where there's no magic. Once magic entered Storybrooke (not that I think it was a bad move to bring it - of course not) plot-lines tended more and more to hinge on convenient magical objects which could bring about all kinds of wonderful things but which for unknown reasons had never been used before, nor were they used again when the plot no longer required them. This time around, the characters will have to rely on their wits to stay out of trouble - luckily, some characters have more wits than others.

So what are my wishes - which, as they're not magic, I hope won't misfire - for Once Upon a Time season 7? (I wont even try to predict anything with this notoriously unpredictable show.)

More characters from real fairy tales We will see new versions of some fairy tales already covered by Once in this season - like Cinderella, as Cinders is Henry's love interest and her wicked stepmother Lady Tremaine is the new villain (yay - I always thought she'd make a great Once baddie!). Fair enough: as there are countless versions of the Cinderella story, I can see how there can be more than one Cinderella in the Once universe, though how there can be more than one Alice in Wonderland beats me. I do hope, however, that the show will take the opportunity to introduce characters from fairy tales we haven't seen yet. There are so many great fairy tales out there crying out for a Once spin: Frau Holle, The Six Swans, The Wishing Table... Heck, they haven't even done Puss in Boots yet.

What I hope we won't see too much of are fictional characters who have nothing to do with fairy tales. I don't mind the odd Kafkaesque bureaucrat here or Cuckoo's Nest-inspired nurse there, and Doctor Whale in Storybrooke was such a hoot that I can forgive him for turning out to be a Victor Frankenstein whom Mary Shelley would surely not have recognised. But season six went overboard with a slew of non-fairy-tale-related characters like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Count of Monte Christo and Captain Nemo. If they had been included because the writers were great fans of the original novels I'd have understood it better, but the characters seemed to be based on vague, popular-culture conceptions of what they're supposed to be like rather than their actual book counterparts. I know enough of the Count of Monte Christo to be able to spot that the Once version neither had the same back-story nor the same personality as the original. In which case, why include him? I'm not one to object to random Rumplestiltskin scenes, but I'd rather see him get his claws into, say, King Thrushbeard than Dr Jekyll or Edmond Dantes.

A little less Disney ABC studios, where Once Upon a Time is aired, is owned by Disney, which means the series can include plenty of references to the classic animated Disney films. Which is fine - I'm a huge Disney fan - but it can become a bit much. I'm not sure including characters from Frozen and Brave in season four and five respectively was a good idea, for instance: Elsa and Anna are charming in their own film, but they fared rather worse when confronted with the regular Once crew who had three full seasons of character development under their belt. As for Merida, she seemed perpetually out of temper.

It will be interesting to see what Once makes of Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, who will appear in the new season. I actually have no idea what fairy tale The Princess and the Frog is supposed to be based on: not the brothers Grimm's The Frog King, at any rate. In this tale, the princess not only does not kiss the frog, she hurls him to the wall - and that's when the curse lifts. (Which in its turn makes the story ideal for a Once take - who could have cast an impish curse like that...?) I like Disney's Tiana a lot, but I'm wondering how they will preserve her endearing workaholic doggedness in a new, non-New Orleans context. Having said that, since we are going to have Tiana, I certainly hope Dr Facilier turns up too.

Good use made of the Storybrooke squad The original heroine Emma may have left, but as long as Rumple and Regina are still on board, Once Upon a Time lives on to fight another day. For Regina, I would dearly like to see a lasting love interest this season. Yes, I get it: she's a strong, independent woman who doesn't need a man to get her happy ending, etc. It was still a little sad that she was pretty much the only one - OK, she and her luckless villain-fancying sister Zelena - not paired up at the end of season six (not that I thought the death of Regina's bland love interest Robin Hood in season five was much of a loss). Regina could also use a little stronger storylines than she's had past seasons. For much of season six, her bad alter ego the Evil Queen - set loose by Dr Jekyll's serum - got to have more funny lines and meaty scenes than her "weak tea" better half Regina. The Queen even fitted in a sizzling affair with Rumplestiltskin/Gold (Belle was AWOL as per usual and threatening to keep his kid from him, so yeah, he was allowed). The resolution to the split personality plot line was a bit of a muddle: suddenly there were two Reginas, with equal parts of light and darkness in them, when the most satisfying conclusion would surely have been to merge the two halves together again. Never mind: maybe confrontations with Lady Tremaine will bring out the old sass and fighting spirit in Regina. As she said herself at one time: "I get antsy when I don't know who to hate".

I've not been a great admirer of Captain Hook (aka Killian Jones - no, I don't know why he's not called James either) so far, on account of his tedious feud with Rumple/Gold, aka "the Crocodile". It feels wrong, though, that there is a version of Captain Hook I don't care for. Also, I can see that the character has potential: he has some funny lines and moments ("My daughter has just lost everything""Well, aren't you mum of the year"), he and Emma are sweet together - though the series wallowed a little too much in their romance for my personal liking - and he sometimes does well out of plot-lines which don't include crocodile-hunting, such as the touching back-story involving his revered older brother Liam. My wish for this season, then, is that Hook and Rumple will finally bury the hatchet in earnest, and Hook will be given something better to do with his time. Judging by one trailer, the two enemies will end up as colleagues in their cursed Hyperion Heights lives. Hook, now a cop, shakes hands with Rumple who purrs "We'll do great work together". They're bound to fall out sooner or later, I guess, but any scene where an oblivious Hook gushes puppyishly over his wonderful new boss would be most welcome.

As for Rumple, I'll take anything I'm given - I'm sure his new cursed persona will be as brilliant as his other incarnations, though I will miss Mr Gold and his natty suits. And surely Lady Tremaine will be the lucky woman who gets dark-sorcerer neck-kissed this season? Come on, she's handsome, she's determined, she's temperamental, she knows her way around a curse - it's bound to happen. It's not that I don't hope that domestic bliss with tiresome Belle still waits further down the line for Rumple when he's de-cursed, but for my money, she can wait a good while yet.