Just now.
The fifteen year old came downstairs for a drink of milk.
"What're you watching, Dad?"
"It's online?"
"What's Little Dorrit about anyway?"
"A little hard to say. It's got several plots going at once. Mainly it's about a young woman named Amy Dorrit who has to work very hard to take care of her selfish and ridiculous family and a very sad man named Arthur Clennam who is convinced his family did something terribly wrong to hers in the past and he's trying to find out what it was so he can make up for it."
"Oh." He peered down at the screen and watched with me for a minute. "Who's that?"
"That's Arthur's mother and that's Rigaud, a blackmailer, con man, and murderer."
"I could tell he's a bad guy by his beard."
"In the book you can tell he's a bad guy by his nose and his mustache. Whenever he smiles his nose comes down over his mustache and his mustache goes up under his nose."
The fifteen year old laughed. I said, "You know who the actor playing him is?"
"Who is it?"
"Andy Serkis."
"Gollum?"
"Yep. That's not what he really looks like though. He's wearing a false nose and a wig."
"I know what he looks like. I saw him as Capricorn in Inkheart. He's very good at playing slimy and evil characters."
"Apparently."
"Do we have the book?"
"Little Dorrit?"
"Yes."
"You want to read it?"
"I think so."
"It's a big one," I said. I happened to have it on the desk nearby. I handed it to him.
"It's not that big," he said.
"Over eight hundred pages."
He shrugged, unfazed. I forgot. This is a kid who read all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings in a week...when he was ten. He thumbed the pages of the book, nodded to himself, and headed upstairs with it. "Night, Dad."
He's still awake up there. I can hear pages turning. I know how he reads a book. He starts by dipping into it here and there, looking for the exciting parts or parts he's heard are important. I'll bet he's looking for Rigaud. Maybe he's found him already. Maybe this is what he's reading this very moment:
She stood at the open door, staggering herself with
this enigma, on a rainy, thundery evening. The clouds were flying
fast, and the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some
neighbouring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty
chimney-cowls and weather-cocks, and rushing round and round a
confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead
citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in all
quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this
attempted desecration, and to mutter, 'Let them rest! Let them
rest!'Mistress Affery, whose fear of thunder and lightning was only to be
equalled by her dread of the haunted house with a premature and
preternatural darkness in it, stood undecided whether to go in or
not, until the question was settled for her by the door blowing
upon her in a violent gust of wind and shutting her out. 'What's
to be done now, what's to be done now!' cried Mistress Affery,
wringing her hands in this last uneasy dream of all; 'when she's
all alone by herself inside, and can no more come down to open it
than the churchyard dead themselves!'In this dilemma, Mistress Affery, with her apron as a hood to keep
the rain off, ran crying up and down the solitary paved enclosure
several times. Why she should then stoop down and look in at the
keyhole of the door as if an eye would open it, it would be
difficult to say; but it is none the less what most people would
have done in the same situation, and it is what she did.From this posture she started up suddenly, with a half scream,
feeling something on her shoulder. It was the touch of a hand; of
a man's hand.The man was dressed like a traveller, in a foraging cap with fur
about it, and a heap of cloak. He looked like a foreigner. He had
a quantity of hair and moustache--jet black, except at the shaggy
ends, where it had a tinge of red--and a high hook nose. He
laughed at Mistress Affery's start and cry; and as he laughed, his
moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.
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I happened to catch the Alec Guinness version on Easter, Lance, and thought of you.
It was...horrid, but then I was never that big a Dickens fan.
Posted by: actor212 | Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 08:08 PM
actor, did you watch both parts? I saw that one a long time ago. I don't remember much of it, except that Derek Jacobi was too elderly, chubby, diffident, and ineffectual as Arthur. There was no reason for Little Dorrit to fall in love with him. He was her father without the vanity. Arthur is supposed to be prone to depression but not to inaction. He's the only active, grown up and unselfihs male Amy's ever encountered. Matthew Macfayden is much better casting. I'm not sure the current PBS/BBC production is much better though. It's a lot easier to take it in 10 minute doses online than to sit through a four and a half hour movie.
Posted by: Lance | Friday, April 17, 2009 at 09:04 AM
Lance,
They showed both parts in one four-hour (at least it felt that long) scouring of my braniwaves.
Funny you mention Derek Jacobi and his relationship with Amy. I had this "ick" moment when I realized what little Amy was discussing with Arthur, precisely because it was a little like me asking one of my daughter's classmates (she's twenty) to marry me.
Only much much worse, of course. I had to refresh myself by reminding myself this was a step up from the era of Henry the VIII and "The Other Boleyn Girl" (which has yet to be filmed properly, but would probably end up being censored as kiddie porn if done truthfully to the book).
I sat thru it, waiting, watching, wanting for something to happen to justify what Amy was going through. About the only scene that really stuck in my head (apart from the ick moment) was the dinner when Dorrit has his breakdown and slides into the delusion of being back in The Marshes again.
Posted by: actor212 | Friday, April 17, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Claire Foy is a much more dynamic Amy than whoever played her in the Guinnes-Jacobi films. And it's no surprise that her Amy's drawn to Arthur because, besides the fact that he looks like Matthew Macfayden (who himself looks closer to 30 than to 40), is the only other dynamic character in the story who isn't a clown or a monster. The age difference doesn't matter between the last two adults in London. But it's funny. The reason Arthur's oblivious at first to Amy's falling in love with him isn't the age difference. It's that he's in love with someone else, Pet Meagles, who's about Amy's age, and around her Arthur is aware of being old enough to be her father. That's what keeps him from declaring his love to Pet. His rival for Pet's affections, Henry Gowan, is a younger man but also an obviously inferior man, selfish, careless, purposeless, and above all incapable of love. Pet is making a big mistake in preferring Gowan to Arthur, but Arthur knows why she does and he backs off. I don't remember if in the novel when he finally realizes he's in love with Amy the same worries about the age difference crops up, but even if they do he gets over them in an instant. What I think this means is that Dickens and his audience probably felt something of an "ick" at the thought of an older man marrying a much younger woman, but I think they were more used to making exceptions---the sheer number of people who did not make it out of their 20s and 30s guaranteed that the marriage pool included lots of widows and widowers, and a 25 year old widow with three children would more likely think of herself as having more in common with a 40 year old who'd been around the block than with a man her own age who was barely more than a kid in outlook and behavior. Amy isn't a widow, of course, but she's been the "mother" in her family since she was old enough to go out to work. In the new production, when a decent and likable young man Amy's own age proposes her, you can see at once that he is fact way too "young" for her and there's no way she could keep herself from thinking of him as a mere boy.
Ironically, the guilty secret in Arthur's family arises from the fact that his mother was older than his father.
Posted by: Lance | Friday, April 17, 2009 at 01:08 PM
I love the way you portray the relationship between you and your son.
Posted by: Mac | Friday, April 17, 2009 at 04:12 PM
Sarah Pickering played Amy in the Guinness version.
One thing I did like about the story (and why I suspect Encore played it at weekend) was the "plus ca change, plus ce meme chose" aspect of the entire town being swindled by Merdle, sort of Bernie Madoff in aspic, and how that event pulls the cobwebs away from so many frauds in the family. That's what happens when a tragedy befalls a house of cards so carefully built, as the suicides of at least two of Madoff's victims has shown.
Posted by: actor212 | Friday, April 17, 2009 at 04:49 PM