1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 91: A dance to the music of time

“There was no way of stopping Widmerpool. He would have to be heard to the end.”

This synoptic remark is from Hearing Secret Harmonies, the twelfth and final novel of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which is named after this painting:

The books have three hundred-odd characters who flit in and out of the narrative for a half-century and then – almost simultaneously – fall like flies. The last novel reports a death every five pages or so.

No other character makes such an impression as does grotesque, bourgeois Widmerpool.

It’s said that Quijote got away from Cervantes, that his saintliness usurped his creator’s satiric intent. So, also – as an object of horror – Widmerpool gets away from Powell. We track his ruthless career rise, his sordid love life, his paths of destruction. Blaze-like, he overwhelms Powell’s throng of aristocrats, activists, and artists; mystics, military men, and MPs; servants, spies, and scholars.

Widmerpool is the embodiment, one critic says,

in an unusually pure form … [of] the power of the will: … obtuse, pompous, socially inept, and at the same time possessed of an almost demonic energy and an unstoppable urge to succeed.

Embarrassment, that poignant English quality, is what distinguishes Widmerpool from, say, Donald Trump. It’s not that Widmerpool lacks crassness: it’s that he’s furtive about it. It’s not that he isn’t propelled by early experiences of domination and humiliation. It’s that he has just enough self-insight to be nauseated by his past.

Perhaps this is what fixes his gaze upon advancement and little else, until he cracks under the weight of his misdeeds.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The 1997 TV series consists of four 100-minute episodes, each covering at least a decade. (They’re much too condensed.) Widmerpool, in all stages of life, is played by Simon Russell Beale. He begins as an overgrown schoolboy and turns into a baby-faced old man. As the years pile up, this spiritual teenager accumulates money and power, to the dismay of his social betters.

The most empathic of these – the tale’s narrator – is Widmerpool’s schoolmate, the writer Nick Jenkins (played in his prime by James Purefoy and in old age by John Standing). Nick is fascinated equally by socialites, Second World War enlistees, pederastic painters, and his parents’ servants. (A housemaid, nervewracked from unrequited love, sees ghosts and wanders nude into a tea party.) And, of course, Nick is fascinated by Widmerpool. SPOILERS AHEAD. Others in Nick’s orbit include the eccentric Uncle Giles (Edward Fox) and his companion, Mrs. Erdleigh, a spiritualist with unerring foresight. The great Nicola Walker, in an early role, is Gypsy Jones, a quarrelsome socialist pacifist who sleeps with both Widmerpool and Nick. (Widmerpool, desperate to maintain an appearance of respectability, funds her medical procedure.) Another flame of Widmerpool’s is the nihilist Pamela Flitton (Miranda Richardson), who awakens every man’s lust but Nick’s. He takes up with serial adulteress Jean (Claire Skinner) before settling down with wholesome aristocrat Isobel (Emma Fielding). Nick’s composer friend Moreland (James Fleet) marries the ex-mistress of the capitalist Sir Magnus Donners and then has a fling with Isobel’s sister; he ends up living with shrewish Mrs. Maclintick (Zoë Wanamaker), whose husband has committed suicide. I’m mentioning just a few of the story’s love affairs. These people are connected professionally as well as sexually. Widmerpool becomes Sir Magnus’s henchman; after Sir Magnus’s stroke, Widmerpool tortures the wheelchair-bound magnate by briefing him on administrative minutae. Even as Widmerpool rises in the business world, he spends weekends in the muddy countryside with his territorial regiment. Then war breaks out, and Widmerpool’s painstakingly curated military rank allows him to lord it over old associates who scramble to find places in the army. One of these is another former schoolmate, Charles Stringham (Pamela’s uncle). Once spoiled and dissolute, Stringham has reformed and enlisted as a private; this act of selflessness places him at Widmerpool’s mercy. Another schoolmate – Jean’s brother, the womanizer Peter Templer – also has his fortune changed by war and Widmerpool. I could go on. The web is vast. Widmerpool is the spider – a colonizer, not a spinner. (But when spiders mate, the male loses.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

These developments take decades. Widmerpool’s beginning is monied but modest. This scene shows Widmerpool and Nick as insecure young men.

The scene’s other characters are Barbara Goring, Johnny Pardoe, and – who’s the third? That’s the trouble. So many people appear just once or twice. Barbara is memorable because she pours the sugar. The others are just her hangers-on. In the books they and dozens like them serve a purpose not easily translated to the screen. Their names are recalled again and again, perhaps twenty or thirty times. One does get a taste of this, watching the adaptation, but on the page it becomes incantatory.

“Don’t be a chump,” a Guardian reviewer advises:

If you’re going to commit to this box set, you should first read Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence. It’s hard enough telling your Buster Foxes from your Tuffy Weedons, your Dicky Umfravilles from your Sunny Farebrothers, even when you’re steeped in this chronicle.

Quite. (And, to my recollection, the witty Dicky Umfraville never appears onscreen, which is a pity.)

Karin watched with me and, after some time, was engrossed. But I supplied omitted material. I honestly don’t know whether someone with no knowledge of the books could enjoy this adaptation.

That’s not to deny that Beale, as Widmerpool, does much to repay the viewer’s effort. Think of Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) in period dress: only, a terror, not a loser.

A funeral; autumn; Dames Daphne and Agatha; who should have played Ariadne Oliver?

R.I.P. Carolyn (1934–2023), a kindly woman in our church who took a shine to our family. Karin & I attended her funeral – or Karin did; I remained in a Sunday School room with our offspring.

(Samuel and Daniel took turns gently pushing a doll in a pram, in circles, in the Sunday School room. By “took turns,” I mean they fought each other for the privilege.)

(Daniel sits on my shoulder as I type this and whacks me on the head. Will the violence ever cease?)

As the weather changes, my thoughts direct themselves toward pleasantly gloomy, autumnal things. Karin already has put our mermaid-skeleton on display. Indeed, she did so before the equinox. … Like my mother, who has gone to Minnesota to look at the leaves, I plan to take a short journey, within a month’s time; I have been thinking of what to read on the airplane. The current frontrunner is a volume of stories by Daphne Du Maurier: “Don’t Look Now,” “The Birds,” etc.

Kenneth Branagh has made a new Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice, which evokes Du Maurier more than its ostensive source material, Agatha Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party – which is set, not along the canals of Venice, but in the gardens and lanes of England. Ariadne Oliver is played by Tina Fey, which is another heresy. I should have preferred Nicola Walker.

I’ve almost finished reading the much-funnier-than-expected King John and have decided that instead of choosing my next play by lot, I’ll just reread Macbeth.

The picture is as good as it gets

I hope my mom doesn’t mind if I tell this story.

She and my dad bought a new TV. But we might return it, she said. The picture is distorted.

I offered to read the manual and explain how to change the settings.

Try to stream a program, I said. It’s easier to check the settings if the TV is in use.

The picture is fine when we stream things or play a local channel, she said. It looks all wrong when we play a DVD. Here is Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. See how broad he looks.

Mom, that just is how Jack Nicholson looks in As Good as It Gets. He wasn’t young anymore in the nineties.

We try another DVD: About Schmidt.

Look at him here!, my mom says. She pauses the movie. Look at how broad he is!

Mom, the picture is fine.

I remind her that Nicholson was even less young – that, consequently, he was even more broad – when he made About Schmidt. And that in the early scenes of that movie, he had to wear an unflattering business suit.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At the library, I spotted a DVD of Annika, the new PBS/Masterpiece series in which the great Nicola Walker plays the lead detective of a made-up Glasgow policing team called the Marine Homicide Unit (it investigates murders committed on boats). DCI Annika Strandhed is quirkier than most. She draws extended analogies between the crimes she solves and Viking or Greek mythology, Ibsen’s plays, bridge-building, or whatever. To my considerable amusement, she relentlessly soliloquizes – as often as not, in front of her longsuffering subordinate detectives.

Annika reminds Karin & me of no one so much as Karin’s mother.

On who can work for the police these days

Today I watched the mystery series Manhunt (2019), featuring Doc Martin’s sour-faced Martin Clunes.

Look at him.

I decided that British TV insidiously promotes the belief – the ideology – that practically anyone could work as a Detective Inspector.

In the halcyon days, detectives in fiction were either private consultants (Sherlock Holmes; Hercule Poirot) or else amateur busybodies (Father Brown; Lord Peter Wimsey; Jane Marple). It was easy enough to accept their quirks. At least those sleuths weren’t representatives of the state. One could keep one’s imagination untainted by bureaucratic matters.

Now, the bureaucracy is almost the main feature. Viewers have come to understand that sleuthing is only feasibly done by the police. Consequently, almost all of today’s detectives are public servants.

In and of itself, this is realistic. The corollary it generates is anything but.

Now we have a parade of crime shows in which every actor who’s made an impression, irrespective of style, in a soap opera, period drama, or comedy gets a turn as a Detective Chief Inspector or Detective Sergeant. (If the actor really, really looks like a goblin, he or she can only rise as high as Medical Examiner.) Yes, some actors are specialists: Douglas Henshell has played a DI on at least five different crime dramas since 2009. But the prevailing attitude seems to be: “You were a valet or a lady’s maid on Downton Abbey. Go on now, take a turn as a DCI.” I can think of at least four Downton servants, and at least four soap stars from Last Tango in Halifax, who’ve switched to policing.

Brenda Blethyn, who, in the fullness of time, might have played Miss Marple, has long investigated murders on Tyneside. Could one such as her character, Vera Stanhope, become a DCI in real life? Yes. Could all these scene-stealers, cumulatively, be DCIs? That is, could Brenda Blethyn and Martin Clunes and Nicola Walker and Kevin Doyle (Mr. Moleseley of Downton Abbey) all struggle with their demons while ordering the lower ranks to comb through the CCTV footage? The system would fall apart.

One suspects that if John Gielgud were still alive, he’d be playing an embattled, semi-retired Superintendent.

Meanwhile, I await the investigations of DCI Richard Ayoade.