An ending Dickens would have liked
It was the novel Charles Dickens never finished. Halfway into the narrative, he suffered from a stroke and died the following day, leaving his mystery unfinished. No one knows how he intended it to end, but after a viewing of this recent adaptation by the BBC I must admit, it has a certain Dickens-esque style.
There is only one woman for John Jasper (Matthew Rhys). Unfortunately, she happens to be introduced to his younger nephew, Edwin Drood (Freddie Fox). An ambitious young man who dreams of foreign travels with a cherub face but has too little respect for his fiancé to please his uncle, he cannot seem to understand how blessed he is to be engaged to such a lovely girl. But Jasper is profoundly aware of it, so much so that his opium-induced fantasies in a darkened corner of a local den often include dispatching with his blonde nephew and taking his place in Rosa's arms. His attention is unnoticed by most but not by Rosa (Tamzin Merchant), who is uncomfortable with...
A Handsome Adaptation That Falters In The Mystery And Suspense Departments
I have always been fascinated by Charles Dickens' final and unfinished novel "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." It is a work that practically screams for different interpretations seeing that the project was left completely open-ended. And I've seen a lot of different takes on the material from the 1935 movie with Claude Rains to the stark 1993 British film and even the quirky musical (which opened in 1985 with Betty Buckley) that relied on audience participation to round out the solution. At heart, it is a tale that combines elements of the horror genre with those of a mystery to tell the sordid tale of a popular young man who goes missing. This Masterpiece Theater presentation takes the expected liberties but does maintain a distinctly Dickensian feel. It is structured in basically three narrative segments (over two installments). In the opening, we meet a cast of eclectic characters. After the disappearance, the film revolves around a couple of investigations that may have relevance to...
A haunting and very Dickensian Drood...
Being something of a Dickens purist, I very rarely watch new adaptations of his novels, television or otherwise, and after being badly disappointed by the BBC's 2011 soap-opera-like adaptation of "Great Expectations", I didn't exactly have high hopes for this film; in fact, I didn't even catch it when it first aired on PBS. After reading the novel (or half of one, anyway), I really wanted to see this and find out just what kind of ending the filmmakers came up with. I was astonished at just how excellent it was, and would rank it as one of the best productions of Dickens I've seen since "David Copperfield".
"The Mystery of Edwin Drood" was Charles Dickens' last novel; he was only able to complete half of it before he died in 1870. He intended his story to be a thriller, requesting that his publisher accept the book in twelve parts instead of the usual twenty. That being said, the film reflects that ideal in spades, clipping along at a nice pace that rivals even the best...
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