TV post: Birdsong
Birdsong, the 2012 adaptation of the pretty silly 1993 book by Sebastian Faulks. I was no fan of the book. The miniseries took a relatively interventionist approach to adapting it, and therefore made it slightly better.
Cut for length; some mild spoilers.
One of my big issues with the book (there were several) was that it was centred on a romance which could have been called She’s Just Not That into You: The Pre-war Years. Isabelle is bored with her life and has a shitty husband, Stephen is persistent and handsome, they run away together, and then at some point she sort of wakes up and realises that she’d rather not, and leaves. The big value-add of the silver screen here is that, not being inside Isabelle’s head, it’s much easier to believe that it was genuinely a doomed, passionate affair. [SPOILER FOR THE BOOK/MINISERIES] Isabelle is pregnant when she leaves, and in the book this reads like she just isn’t that into the idea of Stephen as a dad, whereas in the TV series, they have a little conversation where Stephen (who is an orphan) makes it pretty clear he isn’t keen on fatherhood. This makes Isabelle’s departure slightly more understandable, and the romance and its whimpering end a bit more compelling.[/SPOILER]
Eddie Redmayne (Stephen) and Clémence Poésy (Isabelle) are of an age, which visually erased the slightly weird age gap between Stephen and Isabelle in the book. I didn’t object to the age gap, except in that it played into the overall reading that Isabelle was amusing herself with Stephen, which made it difficult to buy them as A Love For The Ages.
Another thing with the book that annoyed me was the whole stupid plot with Stephen’s granddaughter. I could have a whole rant on why you shouldn’t create half-assed modern “power” women whose only point in the story turns out to be to get pregnant and carry out some spur-of-the-moment promise their dead grandfather made. This plotline was the source of a lot of the what-is-the-point-of-it-all and I-never-understood-the-slaughter posturing, and is excised from the film. Although I know what Faulks was trying to do with it, I was glad to see it gone.
The cast are generally pretty solid. Redmayne has never been a favourite of mine, and the fact that he croaked out every line as if he were in that scene in The Princess Bride with Miracle Max cranking at his lungs didn’t help, but he was all right as Stephen. Poésy was radiant and limpid as Isabelle, which I suppose is all you’d really expect. The other casting was strong; Jeanne, Firebrace and Gray all held their own. A special mention goes to Richard Madden, who was gorgeous as Weir, and brought something to the character which he didn’t have in the book. His constant appearances in various hand-knitted jumpers really worked onscreen.
Intercutting the “romance” and the war scenes served to speed both sections up, and would probably please proponents of both. The miniseries also did a better job of depicting Stephen’s style as an officer and how this would have appeared to the men, and his frustration at being constantly sent down into the tunnels. I have read other reviews that the war scenes were very clean; I agree with that. There was more “sunset over wasteland” and less “constant raining, trench mud uncovering bodies dead for weeks”. The whole thing felt very dreamlike in an Inception-esque way: hard to tell whether he was waking up from the Isabelle scenes into the war or vice-versa. The miniseries also tweaked the ending, which improved it significantly, taking it away from the “literary” non-ending and towards something slightly more satisfying.
All in all, it was a decent, well-shot, well-scripted miniseries that tried to rise above its extremely silly source material.
