Pandemic reading list adaptation weekend, with butling by Pip Torrens

I didn't have a pandemic reading list per se, but when I worried I was piddling away my quarantine on comic books (Watchmen) and weirdly sex-obsessed Philip Roth novels (Sabbath's Theater), I started to kind of formulate one.

I followed Sabbath's Theater with a much-needed dip into the classics with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ordinarily I don't go with two classics in a row, but circumstance pushed me to Jane Austen as next on my to-read list, with her classic, Pride and Prejudice. (And, as an English major, it shames me to say it was the first Austen I had ever read.)

The "circumstance" in question was that I drew Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Austen's most famous novel as my latest monthly selection in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. It's a Facebook group that is associated with the Flickchart movie-dueling website, and each month, you are randomly assigned the highest ranked movie on another person's Flickchart that you haven't yet seen.

Because that's the way I roll, I am very particular about completing the viewing within the month it is assigned. I can only remember two instances of missing my deadline, and in both cases, it was that I couldn't source the movie by the end of the month it was assigned, but did so within the first few days of the new month.

Pride and Prejudice presented me a slightly different obstacle. Although I've seen the Bollywood variation on the novel, Bride and Prejudice, as well as the genre mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I had never yet seen a straightforward adaptation of the book, and therefore, knew only vague things about the plot. I knew that there was some guy named Mr. Darcy and I knew that he ended up with the heroine, but beyond that, it was pretty foreign to me. Which, I suppose, says something about the two cinematic variations listed above.

Upon having the movie assigned to me, I was suddenly struck by the certainty that this was my last, best chance to actually read the book, assuming I wanted to read it before watching and didn't want to forfeit my assignment. So on the last Sunday before the month began, I went to my local bookseller and scooped it up.

Simply put, I loved it. I gobbled it up in pretty much record time for a 367-page novel -- at my slow reading pace, I mean -- which was 25 days. I finished this past Thursday.

So I always knew I was going to watch Pride and Prejudice -- or, properly, Pride & Prejudice, with the ampersand favored by Wright -- this weekend. That viewing ended up landing on Sunday morning. What I didn't know, couldn't have known, was that I would also watch an adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray on Friday night.

Yet I found myself in that circumstance while flipping through the options on Stan. After going through pages and pages of "trending" movies, nine out of every ten of which I'd seen, I landed on Oliver Parker's 2009 adaptation of his namesake's only novel, called simply Dorian Gray. At the time, the future connection with Pride & Prejudice didn't even occur to me. I just knew it would be interesting to see a recent adaptation of this book fresh off the reading of it, even though I was vaguely wary that the movie wasn't really on my radar in 2009, despite it being a period of great cinematic sentience for me in general.

I should say, I also loved The Picture of Dorian Gray. I did not love Dorian Gray, but there were things I admired about it quite a bit. For one, it had a very "wax stamp" type of production design -- that's the umbrella term I use for any movie that either has, or could have, a letter sealed with a wax stamp. The "wax stamp" here was a close-up of the acrylic paint as the artist squeezes it out and dabs it on the canvas.

The adaptation was generally faithful, with a few things changed for narrative convenience. I liked the actor chosen to portray the title character, Ben Barnes, whose name is familiar to me, but I couldn't immediately place him. (Ah, yes, he's in Westworld.) He's got an appearance suited to the role, seeming quite innocent and beautiful, but then quite believably being able to be corrupted into evil.

In the second half, the combining of characters and circumstances becomes a bit more unbalanced, and things become a lot more overheated, so it kind of heads toward a pulpy, effects-laden finale. I shouldn't criticize the effects, though, because I must admit, one of the bits of great interest to me was how sinister they would make the aging painting at the film's center. Ultimately, it's not a huge surprise this wasn't something I considered in 2009 when formulating my year-end list, as it isn't that worthy of an effort in the end. Still enjoyable, but just not quite there.

The comparatively pedestrian look of Dorian Gray was drawn into sharp relief when I got to Pride & Prejudice on Sunday morning. That movie was about a painting, but this one looks like one. I was in awe of Wright's compositions and the way Roman Osin photographs them. I was reminded also that Wright is the man behind the extended Dunkirk beach single take in Atonement. I hadn't expected much cinematic derring do going in, but Wright gives us a breathtaking single shot in this film in which the camera weaves through a busy ball, catching all manner of characters in the midst of all manner of interactions, and frequently, the same characters a different time, interacting with different characters. I positively gaped at that one.

It was really useful to have just read the book, though Deborah Moggach's script is so clear and concise that I mightn't have needed it anyway. In fact, near the start of the book I found my head spinning a bit at the number of characters introduced, and though Moggach and Wright introduce them all here as well, I feel quite certain that on the evidence of the script alone I would have kept them straight in this case.

I've written too much about other things to turn this into the full-on Pride & Prejudice gush-fest I want to give you, but I can't depart without discussing the performances. Keira Knightley is wonderful in this film, a true revelation. Such a stellar cast: Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Tom Hollander, Judi Densch, Jena Malone and Carey Mulligan -- the last before anyone had heard of her, I think. If I first saw Pike in this rather than one of her later roles, I wouldn't probably have started out thinking she had dead eyes, which is something I wrote about back in this post. As for Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy ... he didn't look at all as I imagined him while reading, but he's very definitely convincing as a person who doesn't start out very charming. As Elizabeth Bennet grows to love him, I sort of did too.

But I can't take off, either, without explaining what the hell I meant by the second half of the subject of this post. "Butling by Pip Torrens"?

This is a good one.

When I started watching Dorian Gray, I instantly recognized Pip Torrens as the title character's butler/footman/what have you. Not by name, but by role. Before I looked up his name, I knew Torrens played the queen's secretary on The Crown, Tommy Lascelles. Here he is:

The same qualities that make him a logical choice to play Tommy Lascelles also make him a logical choice to play butlers.

You'll notice I said "butlers," plural. Because lo and behold, who should be waiting on the well-to-do in Pride & Prejudice, as well? That's right, good ol' Pip Torrens -- possibly only in one scene, but I saw him. I caught that distinctive mug, confirmed it online, and laughed my fool head off.

There's one more coincidence between the two movies that's worth pointing out, especially on a blog that likes coincidences as much as this one does. An actor I haven't mentioned in Dorian Gray -- well, I only mentioned one in the first place -- is Colin Firth as Henry Wotton, the libertine who sets Dorian on his path to ruin. Firth does fit what I imagined for that role, and he classes up the joint whenever he's on screen. (As does Rebecca Hall, I should say.)

The reason that's funny is that Firth is known to BBC audiences for one of the earliest roles that thrust him into the spotlight: A one Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 television minseries version of Pride and Prejudice.

And that's all I have to say about that.