REVIEW: TGLPaPS (2018)
Apr. 21st, 2018 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Guernsey Literary Potato and Peel Society (2018) (rated 12A)
Directed by: Mike Newell
Written by: Kevin Hood, Thomas Bezucha, Don Roos
Adapted from the book by: Mary-Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289403/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt
I gave up a gorgeous warm spring evening for this adaptation, so much did I want to see it. I wonder what people who haven’t read the book will make of it. As for me, I enjoyed it and got caught up in the emotion, for instance, the pay-off of having seen Elizabeth give Eli her father’s medal to help him to be brave in him giving it to Dawsey before he goes to tell Kit that her mother won’t be coming back, because Kit will need her grandfather’s medal to be brave. But that didn’t make me blind to the fact that there were a few clunky expositionary moments. Objectively speaking, I think Their Finest was a better film, but I had never read the source material.
As I’d suspected, the film cuts down heavily on the letters, but uses voice-over nicely in Juliet and Dawsey’s correspondence, using both writer and reader’s voice, which suggests the meeting of minds between the characters. Voice-overs lead to flashbacks – the film begins effectively with the hurried, desperate genesis of the society, and then takes us to Juliet in London, 1946. We have only the one flashback to her war, but that and her response to the rebuilding of post-Blitz London and her discomfort in Mark’s opulence world, having been at the top of the film, set her up well. There are then various flashbacks to key scenes for the Guernsey characters during the occupation.
The main characters are all present and correct, even the children, although they’re the last to be introduced, and Kit’s role is a little slimmed down, understandably, given the child actress’s age. For a while, I wondered if we would ever see her in close-up, but we do, and although we lose the game where she and Juliet dressed up as the fake-dead bride and she kisses Juliet’s knee (I felt their loss keenly!), we do see Juliet building a rapport with Kit and getting to see her box of treasures. In fact, both child actors are very naturalistic, and I thought they did well on the similarity between the two boys playing Eli at different ages.
But the slimming down of the plot, particularly bringing Juliet to Guernsey as quickly as possible, has ramifications and one of them is a bit negative. Juliet now decides, on the basis of very few letters with just Dawsey, that she must go to Guernsey and see the society for herself. She wants to avoid the book tour, which doesn’t seem to have gone on so long, yes; she is seeking material for The Times article on reading and, more widely, what she’ll write next; she’s drawn to the society as described by Dawsey and his feeling for books; and, perhaps unconsciously, she’s running from Mark. But this means she hasn’t built up a relationship with the rest and not only foists herself on them a bit, although she’s properly tested at her first meeting, but she comes off as very nosy and curious, as she’s just turned up and is asking questions about obviously sensitive subjects – the missing Elizabeth and Kit’s parentage being the biggest. It causes believable tensions, Amelia is especially hard to win over and Juliet has to promise not to write about the society, although, in the end, she has to break that promise, which is another change to the character. Even if she’s asking questions the audience will have, it alters our heroine.
Juliet therefore isn’t an invited guest who gets to live in Elizabeth’s cottage and become Kit’s foster mother, either. By cutting Remi and Sidney’s visits to the island, the romantic tension comes from Juliet keeping her engagement to Mark a secret. She won’t wear his (flashy) ring, and you don’t believe (neither does Sidney’s face) that it’s for the reasons she gives out loud. But here Juliet is given cause to think that Dawsey was Kit’s birth father, as opposed to her foster father – he’s explicitly her main carer and Kit calls him Daddy, and the film plays on the possibility that Dawsey could have had romantic feelings for Elizabeth in a way that I didn’t get from the book. Nonetheless, you’re given plenty of reason to root for Juliet and Dawsey, as well as Juliet and the island, as a writer and a woman.
Mark is no longer in publishing, but something military, which is how they get the confirmation of Elizabeth’s death. Certain scenes are changed, taking place at a different time of day or even location, exchanges via correspondence become dramatized, and other things are only referenced, but given all the changes, quite a lot of it is faithful to what happens in the book. Matthew Goode’s Sidney is Juliet’s only ‘family’ on the mainland, and it could now be taken that Juliet lost her parents during the Blitz, not earlier.
The cast are very good. Although I did wonder if Lily James was a touch too young to play Juliet, she projects what she’s feeling beautifully. Michiel Huisman’s accent isn’t quite right, but he’s a very welcome movie version of Dawsey. Jessica Brown-Findlay makes a powerfully vivid impression as Elizabeth, although both she and James are playing characters with striking similarities to their characters in Downton Abbey. JB-F and Penelope Wilton share strong scenes, the latter playing Amelia. Katharine Parkinson is excellent as Isola and deploys laugh-inducing comic timing.
There’s just enough literary squabbling – more if you stay for a bit of the credits, and, I thought, the glimpse into the wider story of Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, although perhaps I was bringing my knowledge of the book into this. The film has to focus on incidents that revolved around the main characters.
Directed by: Mike Newell
Written by: Kevin Hood, Thomas Bezucha, Don Roos
Adapted from the book by: Mary-Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289403/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt
I gave up a gorgeous warm spring evening for this adaptation, so much did I want to see it. I wonder what people who haven’t read the book will make of it. As for me, I enjoyed it and got caught up in the emotion, for instance, the pay-off of having seen Elizabeth give Eli her father’s medal to help him to be brave in him giving it to Dawsey before he goes to tell Kit that her mother won’t be coming back, because Kit will need her grandfather’s medal to be brave. But that didn’t make me blind to the fact that there were a few clunky expositionary moments. Objectively speaking, I think Their Finest was a better film, but I had never read the source material.
As I’d suspected, the film cuts down heavily on the letters, but uses voice-over nicely in Juliet and Dawsey’s correspondence, using both writer and reader’s voice, which suggests the meeting of minds between the characters. Voice-overs lead to flashbacks – the film begins effectively with the hurried, desperate genesis of the society, and then takes us to Juliet in London, 1946. We have only the one flashback to her war, but that and her response to the rebuilding of post-Blitz London and her discomfort in Mark’s opulence world, having been at the top of the film, set her up well. There are then various flashbacks to key scenes for the Guernsey characters during the occupation.
The main characters are all present and correct, even the children, although they’re the last to be introduced, and Kit’s role is a little slimmed down, understandably, given the child actress’s age. For a while, I wondered if we would ever see her in close-up, but we do, and although we lose the game where she and Juliet dressed up as the fake-dead bride and she kisses Juliet’s knee (I felt their loss keenly!), we do see Juliet building a rapport with Kit and getting to see her box of treasures. In fact, both child actors are very naturalistic, and I thought they did well on the similarity between the two boys playing Eli at different ages.
But the slimming down of the plot, particularly bringing Juliet to Guernsey as quickly as possible, has ramifications and one of them is a bit negative. Juliet now decides, on the basis of very few letters with just Dawsey, that she must go to Guernsey and see the society for herself. She wants to avoid the book tour, which doesn’t seem to have gone on so long, yes; she is seeking material for The Times article on reading and, more widely, what she’ll write next; she’s drawn to the society as described by Dawsey and his feeling for books; and, perhaps unconsciously, she’s running from Mark. But this means she hasn’t built up a relationship with the rest and not only foists herself on them a bit, although she’s properly tested at her first meeting, but she comes off as very nosy and curious, as she’s just turned up and is asking questions about obviously sensitive subjects – the missing Elizabeth and Kit’s parentage being the biggest. It causes believable tensions, Amelia is especially hard to win over and Juliet has to promise not to write about the society, although, in the end, she has to break that promise, which is another change to the character. Even if she’s asking questions the audience will have, it alters our heroine.
Juliet therefore isn’t an invited guest who gets to live in Elizabeth’s cottage and become Kit’s foster mother, either. By cutting Remi and Sidney’s visits to the island, the romantic tension comes from Juliet keeping her engagement to Mark a secret. She won’t wear his (flashy) ring, and you don’t believe (neither does Sidney’s face) that it’s for the reasons she gives out loud. But here Juliet is given cause to think that Dawsey was Kit’s birth father, as opposed to her foster father – he’s explicitly her main carer and Kit calls him Daddy, and the film plays on the possibility that Dawsey could have had romantic feelings for Elizabeth in a way that I didn’t get from the book. Nonetheless, you’re given plenty of reason to root for Juliet and Dawsey, as well as Juliet and the island, as a writer and a woman.
Mark is no longer in publishing, but something military, which is how they get the confirmation of Elizabeth’s death. Certain scenes are changed, taking place at a different time of day or even location, exchanges via correspondence become dramatized, and other things are only referenced, but given all the changes, quite a lot of it is faithful to what happens in the book. Matthew Goode’s Sidney is Juliet’s only ‘family’ on the mainland, and it could now be taken that Juliet lost her parents during the Blitz, not earlier.
The cast are very good. Although I did wonder if Lily James was a touch too young to play Juliet, she projects what she’s feeling beautifully. Michiel Huisman’s accent isn’t quite right, but he’s a very welcome movie version of Dawsey. Jessica Brown-Findlay makes a powerfully vivid impression as Elizabeth, although both she and James are playing characters with striking similarities to their characters in Downton Abbey. JB-F and Penelope Wilton share strong scenes, the latter playing Amelia. Katharine Parkinson is excellent as Isola and deploys laugh-inducing comic timing.
There’s just enough literary squabbling – more if you stay for a bit of the credits, and, I thought, the glimpse into the wider story of Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, although perhaps I was bringing my knowledge of the book into this. The film has to focus on incidents that revolved around the main characters.
Tags:
