CINEMA: Digby Ricci
IF Mike Figgis’ The Browning Version does not entirely destroy the poignancy and subtlety of Terence Rattigan’s remarkable short play, it cannot be said to have failed to make the effort. Rattigan’s original is an uncompromising study of misconceived love turned rancid, of failed idealism taking refuge in self-caricature, of all the “repulsive little molehills” that indicate mountains of human pain and savagery.
It is written in a dryly aphoristic style that succeeds in lacerating the reader or viewer. “Both of us needing from the other something that would make life supportable for us, and neither of us able to give it. Two kinds of love. Hers and mine. Worlds apart,” is Crocker-Harris’ assessment of his marriage, and such bleak eloquence is typical of this masterly piece of drama.
Ronald Harwood’s expansion of Rattigan’s succinct masterpiece dots all i’s with pumpkins (to adapt one of Henry James’s memorable gibes). Every subtlety is crudified by laborious repetition (“It’s insurance policy, sweetener, a bribe,” Mrs Crocker-Harris comments on Taplow’s gift, as opposed to the devastating “a few bobs’ worth of appeasement” in the original). Harwood’s expletives and sexual explicitness jar horribly with Rattigan’s restrained yet pointed lines; and the modernisation of the original (it is updated from the Fifties to the Nineties) seems especially pointless. Wide-skirted frocks, flowered hats and Gilbert and Sullivan selections are authentically part of the Rattigan world; references to perestroika, multiculturism and computers are not.
I shall not bother to dwell on the ridiculous subplot about a defeated school bully, and I suppose Figgis and Harwood cannot take the blame for repeating the more “upbeat” speech day finale of Anthony Asquith’s 1951 film.
Figgis can, however, be blamed for far too many visual floridities. Firework displays, wickets toppling in slow motion, circling overheads of velvety playing fields — all the stops are pulled in an attempt to transform a Strindbergian piece into a Pinero melodrama. A cluster of superb performances thwarts this attempt, but it’s touch and go at times.
Corpulent and grizzled, Albert Finney may seem unlikely casting as the tormented classics master, Crocker-Harris, and he does not succeed in obliterating memories of Michael Redgrave’s definitive performance in Asquith’s film, but his portrayal is a magnificent study of suppressed pain and passion, and he conveys an intensity of emotion simply by tightening his lips, slightly dilating his eyes, or allowing his shoulders to sag. His breakdown over Taplow’s gift could not be better played.
Greta Scacchi, not an actress for whom I have great admiration, is equally good as his wife, Laura (Millie in the original). Her malice and bitchery are chillingly convincing, and her flickers of self-disgust and pathos are expressed with a restraint that equals that of Finney. Ben Silverstone, a dark-haired child with luminous eyes and quite astonishing cheekbones, plays Taplow heartbreakingly well. These three are true to Rattigan’s original, and at times raise this often crass film to the level of dramatic art.