Movie Review: Cranford (BBC Series)

I sat down this morning to finish watching the BBC series "Cranford," which is based on three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. The story takes place in the 1840s in a small town in England and it's DELIGHTFUL! I can't recommend it highly enough. (I checked it out of the library after waiting to get it from a long hold list...apparently the word is out.)

Anyway, I went looking on the Internet to see if others are as enthusiastic about it as I am and found this very British review by A.A. Gill in the London Times Online. It's so funny I thought I'd post clips of it here in the hope that others will be inspired to watch so that I will have someone to discuss it with! (The DVD is due at the library today or I'd pass it around...)

(You'll see that A.A. Gill is enthralled with an actress in the film named Atkins, but I loved Imelda Staunton the most, who plays a spinster named Miss Pole. I had to hear every word she spoke and catch all of her facial expressions. She is hilarious!)


Here, in part, is A.A. Gill's Review:


I’ve never read Cranford, and, just between the two of us, neither have you. It’s on our list, though, and has been since we were 18 and first discovered we had a list....only the English have a list of books they haven’t read. Mrs Gaskell is a large bra, right at the top of our unread laundry.

...I’m embarrassed by the cringing cultural kitsch of the classic serial.

So, I sat down to Cranford(Sunday, BBC1) girded and gimlet-eyed, my modernist cudgel ready to bludgeon it to a silly pulp. Then, in the very first minute, Eileen Atkins gave me a look – just for a moment, a sideways look, more a glance, really, but it had such depth of character, such promise of interest and intimations of stories to come of hardship and parsimony, of steadfastness, piety, worldliness and a little kindness, all packed together in that one tiny gesture, like an apothecary’s spice box – and I realised it was all up. I was hooked, gaffed, netted and filleted.

Atkins could have me for her tea with tartare sauce. She is the cur’s cods, the terrier’s testicles, the business.

I will go further and declare that Atkins is the finest actor appearing anywhere in the world right now. There is, in her performance, a miraculous ability to project a complex subtext or emotion and motivation in her face and posture, while delivering words that seem real and immediate but, simultaneously, tell us something quite different. With the merest tightening of a lip or flickering of an eye, she raises doubts, opens lines of plot and is able to hold and impart contradictory emotions clearly and profoundly. To be able to do this isn’t just talent or craft or practice, it is an intense sensitivity, an insight into the dilemmas of the human spirit. She is an era-defining actress.

And with her we got Judi Dench. To use a technical term, that was double bubble. Dench was the straight man, the feed, clearing space and giving time to Atkins. It was a performance of immense generosity, born from confidence and the understanding that to listen is as important as to speak; that a part isn’t measured in how many lines you say, but in how many are said to you. Between them, they created scenes of bright brilliance. But then, this was an entire cast of brilliant women, and I could fill the rest of this page with luvvie notes written in violet spittle, but I shan’t.

Cranford is a story of a lot of fairly silly women fussing about things of monumental insignificance...And we have a particularly strong cast of actresses who find themselves in their prime. The reason there are so many of them in Cranford is that the only people who will write decent parts for them are dead lady novelists, and that’s not just a shame, it’s a sinful waste of a great national resource.