Surprisingly, this is the first time the Beeb has had a go at Tess of the D’urbervilles.
They’ll have to have a re go at it. Because this adaptation is not good enough. Not for me anyway.
Primarily because I couldn’t buy into Gemma Arterton as Tess or Eddie Redmayne (left there) as Angel Claire. Hans Matheson (on the right) was okish as Alec D’Urberville.
The trout-pouts of Gemma and Eddie were continously distracting, and eventually quite irritating.
Here is Arterton with lips that look inflated with filler.
Have her lips been botoxed I kept thinking. They appeared distorted, unnatural, as if surgically enhanced especially for the part (as Tess is described in the novel as having ‘rosebud lips’).
And Redmaynes lips are just as bad.
Weird puffed up swollen things his lips.
Eddie looks, and behaves, throughout like an immature preppy 6th former.
It makes no sense why Tess (or any of the other milkmaids) are so obsessed with his hapless Eddie baby angel act. He’s so sickly sweet and innocent his cruel rejection of Tess seems too extremely out of character to be credible.
The biggest credibility gap of all is Gemma Arterton. She’s no Tess. Her Dorset accent keeps slipping into simpering post posh babydoll estuarine. There’s nothing roughly rusticated about her. Her pouty trout makes you think you’re watching a model in a collagen ad. Emotional volatility is subsumed inside a depthless dreary vapidity.
At least good old dear old Anna Massey doesn’t disappoint as blind bird batty Mrs D’Urberville.
This was one of the last dramas for TV she did before she died in 2011 (aged 73)
One of the biggest drawbacks in this adaptation is something that spoils just about every mainstream drama you see: the music.
This is, like they all are, strung up with an orchestrally lush soundtrack, a psuedo Vaughan Williams knock-off.
I’m not watching mainstream dramas (whether cinema or TV) so the amount, and extent, this lushing up infects the story telling becomes conspiciously and intrusively alarming.
And then I get to think how mediocre most mainstream drama is. The ersatz homogeneity and cliched predictability of it all; every climactic scene plastered with the same old grandioise cloying sentimentality. The sentiments you are meant to feel, and are going to feel, larded on with a size 10 trowel.
Then I get to think that when you start disliking something nothing it seems can drag it back from the brink of antipathy.
Everything becomes irritating.
And about half way through ep 2 thats increasingly how I felt about this souped up confection: irritated.
Dir: David Blair, UK
4/10
Windows on the World 