maryon-1 Reviews

Ordeal by Innocence (2018)

Agatha Christie come back, all is forgiven

[3/10 · 19 April 2018]

Presumably - as with the majority of BBC writers - Sarah Phelps is unable to come up with her own plots and so pinches those of other writers.

That's fine of course, and this stealing of other people's ideas has a long, long history - but real writers use the armature and then cover it with their own work of art.

The BBC, however, has a long history of distorting the armature willy nilly before even beginning to create; then the creation proves nothing except that whichever scriptwriter is responsible hasn't understood the original work.

If Sarah Phelps and the BBC are so creative that they know better than Agatha Christie how to create a plot and tell a story (Agatha Christie is only the world's best-selling author - ever - after all...), then why don't they create their own work from scratch?

Or at least leave the armature intact.

There are artistic reasons for making changes to an original work if you're reproducing them at a later date. None of those reasons exist here (that's why Agatha Christie's work is devoured by each successive generation of readers). So the changes are gratuitous, and artistically pointless.

Good points:

• The opening sequence was mesmerising and atmospheric
• The acting was good in the main (shame about the direction and pace)
• It was a long dramatisation and so served to pass the time

Bad points:

• The sets and props were wrong in so many ways
• The music was, as so often with BBC productions, over-loud and intrusive
• The direction was turgid and made the characters even more unpalatable (and, dare it be said, boring) than even the script had rendered them
• The plot wasn't Agatha Christie's 'Ordeal by Innocence' (so why bill it as such?)
• The plot lacked subtlety, characterisation (just the usual BBC cardboard figures) and, ultimately, interest
• It was way overlong, extended by a slow pace throughout, pointless bits of cinematography, overlong close-ups, pieces of graphic insertion wherever possible, etc. - all in the interests of padding out the thin plot to stretch over three episodes

Thank heavens Agatha Christie will never know.

And Then There Were None (2015)

And then there was a falling off

[7/10 · 28 March 2018]

This is certainly the best 'film of the book' there has ever been - so far. The title sequence alone deserves an Oscar, with those beautiful jade figurines disintegrating and morphing into a model of the island where it all happens.

The house, the cast, the pathetically fallacious cloud formations, sunsets and dramatic weather, the costumes, hair and makeup taking each character from groomed control to dishevelled à la Marat/Sade - everything contributes to this brilliant psychological drama of Agatha Christie at her finest.

The only thing missing was Agatha Christie's brilliance.

There is a lack of understanding in this film of the original plot, which is not only fatal to the interpretation but is actually quite horrible. It is, in the final analysis, typical BBC. Every time the BBC dramatises a classic (Austen, Dickens, Conan Doyle...) it should have, just under the title, the words 'Loosely based on an idea by' - as a kind of caveat.

Agatha Christie's book (originally titled, in the UK, as 'Ten Little Niggers', in accordance with the terminology of the time - this was after all 1939...) has a completeness and subtlety of plot which the BBC can for some reason never achieve. Every tiny detail, as in a fine tapestry, fits in with and contributes to the whole. Everything is in its place - and the reader overlooks it at their peril.

So why did the BBC (in the persons of the screenwriter, director, et al.) omit things like the red oilskin curtain, the hiding of the grey skein of wool (inexpertly wound into an unusable ball by Miranda Richardson), the pooling and securing of possible murder implements, the bee, the seaweed, and so on? Why were the original murders made physical to an obviously culpable extent when the whole point of the plot is that they were not so, because they were too 'hands off'?

It is, after all, in this last respect why every reader kicks themself as they turn the last page of Agatha Christie's most perfect work - because she provided not only all the clues but actually also the only possible solution, elegantly displayed along the way, for the Hastings-blind reader who missed it all.

And then there's the larding of the BBC's currently in-favour - but inappropriate to the time and to Agatha Christie's oeuvre and taste - swear words. Plus the physical manifestation of the particularly favoured word between Vera Claythorne and Philip Lombard. What the fuck is all that about?. (See - doesn't add anything, does it ?) Have the BBC never heard of dramatic tension (oh, wait...)? If they'd kept faithful to the original in every respect, they wouldn't have needed to add anything as silly as a one-night stand and a few tacky close-ups of thighs, stocking tops, torsos, and cleavage.

Good, verging on excellent - but in the event not good enough. Worth a watch, but not a buy.

We'll just have to wait another twenty-nine or forty-one years for the next one to come along...

Boy A (2007)

Did you enjoy this, Denise?

[3/10 · 12 February 2018]

Yes, this film was well acted (very well, actually). Yes it was fairly much interesting to watch.

Was it a good film?

No. It was a film trading on an emotional subject. The word is exploitative.

The question which should have been addressed by this film was 'Do children/young adults aged ten know the difference between right and wrong; are they culpable of murder?' The question which was asked was something along the lines of 'Do you feel sorry for this good-looking boy who was easily led and who killed a girl who was assertive?' - or something along those lines.

The correlation between this film and its underlying question and the James Bulger case can't be overlooked. It's likely that the film is trading on that very correlation. The facts of the Bulger case - that the murder was premeditated, that the murder was drawn out, that the victim was tortured, that there was a sexual element (and so on) - were overlooked where inconvenient undermines Boy A. It raises the suspicion that this film is a sentimental sensationalisation and nothing more.

Boy A was released at twenty-four; The James Bulger murderers were released at age eighteen - they were protected from having to serve time in an adult prison. They were released when, given the ages at which murderers and rapiists are at their most active, they were most likely to reoffend. This is a hugely significant difference.

The protagonist in Boy A, played by Andrew Garfield who is a good-looking and intelligent guy, engages our sympathy from the beginning. The victim, the girl murdered, doesn't even appear until the end of the film and, when she does, is presented unsympathetically. She's shouty and dictatorial - probably she's asking for it?...

Victims aren't to blame for being murdered. Parents aren't to blame - as they are shown to be in this film - for producing murderers. If the latter were true, why would one child of a family turn out to be a murderer, or a rapist, and the other children turn out OK? When it comes down to it, the only person to blame for a murder (or a rape, or an assault, or whatever.) is the person who did it. And some people are just evil.

Whatever the answer, whatever is the solution to the evil people amongst us, this film doesn't address it. It simply sentimentalises the question for the sake of selling a film.

That would make it cheap, nasty, exploitative and damaging. An insult to people like Denise, the mother of a two-year-old child who was abducted, terrorised, tortured and killed, without rhyme or reason.

It would be a gloss on the fact that we, as taxpayers, have had to fork out millions to protect the murderers of this two-year-old child. And the amount is rising all the time because one of the murderers got drunk and revealed his identity so he had to be given another one; one of the murderers has had to be recalled to prison twice for child pornography offences. And so it goes on.

The justice system, certainly in the UK, focuses on the care of the perpetrators; the victims are forgotten. We don't need a film which does the same.

If Denise, the mother of James Bulger, has the misfortune to see this film it will add to her agony. That is disgraceful - and it undermines any artistic integrity the film might have had in the first place.

I wish I'd never seen this film; if you have a choice before you decide to see it I would urge you to boycott it.