 |
| You could be forgiven for thinking she's playing the Snow Queen. |
Adapated from Leo Tolstoy's famous
novel, the War & Peace series aired over several weeks in four
installments across three networks: A&E, History, and Lifetime.
It was originally a BBC production, having begun airing in England a few
weeks prior to commencing over here, but both concluded at the same time. Clocking in
at eight hours air time...though, with commercials, the actual
production likely runs about six...it stars Paul Dano, Lily James, James
Norton, Jessie Buckley, Jack Lowden, Aisling Loftus, Tuppence
Middleton, Tom Burke, Callum Turner, and features appearances by Stephen
Rea, Brian Cox, Jim Broadbent, and Gillian Anderson.
War & Peace is well-known as one of the most famous (and longest)
works in literature, and has something of a frightening reputation due
to said length and the rather large number of characters it contains.
It's a tale of historical fiction, set against the backdrop of the
Napoleonic Wars...indeed, Napoleon himself is a character...and
specifically focuses on the 1812 invasion of Russia by the Grande Armee,
from the Russian perspective. It's an incredibly rich and complex
work, but ultimately an enjoyable read. I didn't find it quite as
daunting as I'd feared; the opening chapters, in which the reader is
introduced to several dozen characters, many of whom have four or five
names, is somewhat overwhelming, but once I got a handle on who everyone
was - and what their various surnames and diminutives were - I found it
fairly straightforward to follow the main plots without getting bogged
down. Yes, there are hundred of characters in the book, but a huge
percentage of them are incidental.
 |
| The most important of the 5,000,000 characters in the book. |
First and
foremost, I should mention that the series is largely very faithful to
the novel - all of the principal characters are present, and the primary plotlines emerge more or less intact. Yes, the production is
explicitly steamier than the novel, but there's no whole-cloth manufacture of new
characters, and nothing of major plot-related impact is lost. Like most of the
BBC adaptations, War & Peace is true to the original source as far
as story and character goes.
The miniseries does opt to take a more intimate focus, following the major characters and
allowing their stories to drive the action, while cutting or reducing
most of the minor characters and playing down much of the broad
historical tableau. While I understand the need to do this, and grant
that it works rather well, I can't help but feel that an opportunity was
lost. Tolstoy has a fantastic pattern, in which he starts sections of the novel on the grand scale, and discusses
'big picture' topics, before gradually boiling down from the
philosophical to the regional, down to the specific character he's
following in that section. It functions very much akin to a wide zoom
effect. The miniseries foregoes this, with the result that we don't get
a lot of explanation of the context of what's happening, and see very
little of the larger world, or cultural and historical flavor of the
work. Also, the sets are usually small and contained, so the sense of the
vastness of Russia is somewhat lost. Add that to the focus on
character, and it does feel like the mini-series is cropping the book in
scope.
That's not entirely
a criticism, though, as it brings the characters and the performances
to the forefront. War & Peace is full of rich, multi-faceted personalities, few of whom are entirely good or bad, and most of whom are
truly engaging. Tolstoy presents them without narrative criticism, and the miniseries manages to duplicate that feat. Paul Dano, fresh off his turn as a young Brian Wilson,
plays the principle protagonist Pierre Bezukhov, a wealthy, awkward
young man who seeks to live a good meaningful life in a materialistic
society of shallow aristocrats. Dano is fantastic here, in probably his
best performance to date, with hopeful optimism tempered by
uncertainty, frustration and anger. Lily James, perhaps best known as Lady Rose on Downton Abbey, is a beautiful, vulnerable Natasha
Rostov; James plays the sheltered, sweet Natasha with a wonderful
mixture of restraint and elan. She avoids the trap of making Natasha
too beatific, allowing the audience to see the character is deeper than
most of the other characters allow.
 |
| Wait, you're not Mr. Carson... |
The
rest of the cast is extremely solid. James Norton is sympathetic and compelling as the
stoic, bored, and somewhat emotionally repressed and fatalistic Andrei Bolkonsky, torn by guilt and 'seeking
the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth'. Tuppence Middleton
plays Helene Kuragin, Pierre's duplicitous wife, with an odd charm that
belies her hedonistic, incestuous nature. Jack Lowden is Nikolai
Rostov, Natasha's arrogant, foolish brother, a character who is rather
difficult to like, and yet Lowden manages to allow the audience to pity
Nikolai even as it wants to condemn him. Jessie Buckley, who plays Andrei's
sister Marya, takes what could have been a thankless part and empowers
the character, giving her more warmth and depth than the script really
fleshes out. Overall, there are no bad or even mediocre performances
here; perhaps the worst I could say is that Jim Broadbent, as Andrei
& Marya's father, comes across as somewhat cartoonish at points,
rather than eccentric.
The costumes are
lovely - rich gowns and detailed uniforms, golds and greens and blues
that are striking, ornate and eye-catching. The sets, while on the
smaller scale, are well shot; there is some fascinating camera work
playing on light and shadow on the interiors, and the exterior shots
show a surprisingly lush and beautiful Russia (or Lithuania or Latvia - the
production was filmed on location.) The battle scenes are a bit
erratic; because of the narrower focus of the series, the full scope of
the action seems lost, and it's hard to grasp the impact of what's
happening. Because of the focus - or perhaps the budget - these scenes which are epic in the novel feel truncated and smaller than they should.
There are a few other issues -
the most obvious being some very odd transitions and cuts between
scenes. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the insertion of
commercial breaks, or if perhaps there were additional scenes removed
from the American airing, but the series frequently suffers from jarring
jumps between lines of narrative, and it reduces the clarity of the
story. Along the same lines, there are places where it feel like scenes
end too early or abruptly, curtailing a moment that should have been
allowed to develop more. The series doesn't always flow as it should;
perhaps this is just a matter of condensing a fourteen-hundred-page
novel into six hours of television, but it still feels uneven. And as
might be expected, the series does play up the more salacious elements
of the book...for example, Helene's affairs, including an ongoing one
with her brother, are fully depicted on screen, whereas they're only
obliquely alluded to on page.
 |
| Ah, the problems of the gorgeous young wealthy aristocracy... |
The score of
the series doesn't quite work, either. Most of the music is provided by
a Russian chorus, a mellifluous dirge that works in some scenes but is
incredibly distracting in others, and which I think represents a lost
opportunity...like other great epics, War & Peace deserves
orchestrations, and the simplified approach here falls short, and at times, borders on the comical.
The ending also left me slightly dissatisfied. Tolstoy's narrative
is not what I'd call tidy at is conclusion, as the fates of several
characters are left open, and the final scene among the surviving
protagonists is a 'warts and all' epilogue, hinting at realistic
underlying troubles and the possibility of future tumult in Russia.
The series interprets this in a more bucolic, happily-ever-after take on
the epilogue, which works for the purposes of wrapping things up, but fails to convey the more nuanced meaning and impact of the novel. It's nice, don't get me wrong, and it's not a critical flaw, but it's a
little bit too neat for my tastes.
Still,
overall I quite enjoyed the series. High production values, a faithful
script, strong performances and a sense of energy make this a worthwhile
adaptation. There's never truly a substitute for the original novel,
of course, in any retelling, but as versions go, this one was quite
well-done, and I'd recommend it for anyone who liked the novel and would like to see it on screen, or for those who haven't challenged Tolstoy directly, but would like to know the story.
Honestly, it's given me a bit of a desire to re-read the
book.
FINAL RATING: 8 PAWS (OUT OF 10):
No comments:
Post a Comment