Silas Marner (1985)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was one of the most interesting Victorian authors with only significant credits, while "Silas Marner" is a small changeling among an impressing lot of masterpieces - but her finest story. Ben Kingsley makes one of his finest performances and brings full justice to the heart-rending character of a vulnerable man suffering from occasional catalepsy, which results in his fate. His best friend takes advantage of it to both ruin him and steal his girl by getting him implicated in a theft and banished from town. Dishonored he becomes a miser and recluse as a weaver living alone in a cottage outside a small country town. This is where the story begins, which is a revelation of humanity and tenderness in the claws of a cruel destiny of injustice involving deaths, roguery and tragedy. The film follows the book closely and gives adorable scenery of local life in the mid 1800s, but there is one important scene in the book which you miss in the film. When Eppie is becoming a young lady, he visits his old town Lantern Yard with her and finds himself at a loss completely, Everything is changed, and the old story of the theft is never cleared. Here Silas Marner is at the heart of his tragedy, unfairly implicated and doomed for life to live under the burden of a guilt never cleared. The film is only for television and perfectly apt for that purpose and, which is most important, communicates the main contents of the tale with full bearing. It is George Eliot's most human tale with almost documentary pregnancy in its convincing honesty, which the film takes well care of.

In the great Frank Capra classic Meet John Doe, when Gary Cooper first meets up with Regis Toomey and others in the small town that he got off after fleeing the radio station after the speech, among the stories that Toomey tells is about Sourpuss Smithers. He's described as a miserly cuss that no one would bother with. But when the budding John Does investigated they found there was a reason why a person can become as mean and cynical as they are. It can happen when your faith in people is shattered.Which is exactly what George Elliott wrote about when she created Silas Marner who starts out as a decent soul. He's accused of a theft and while nothing can be proved and there's indication he was framed, the good Calvinist people of his church blackball him and since that's what the majority of his town were, he was left isolated.Marner leaves that town and settles near another town called Raveloe where he lives apart and alone, hoarding his money made from his weaver's trade and refusing to associate with anyone else. He's robbed of his money and this further embitters him.But coming into his life is a young girl maybe a year or two old who is found by the weaver in the dead of winter wandering in the woods. The body of her opium addicted mother is nearby. The young girl has a lineage connected to Raveloe's most prominent family. Still Marner takes her into raise and that contact melts him. He becomes quite the caring person.Ben Kingsley plays the title role of Silas Marner and dominates the film as the character dominates the book. Kingsley is superb in a role that calls for the individual to gradually shift in emotions over the course of the story. Angela Pleasence as the young girl's degenerate mother makes her scenes count as well as does the young lady who grows up to be Patsy Kensit.Still you will remember Ben Kingsley's performance which will linger with you a long time after you see this Masterpiece Theater production of Silas Marner.

Nine years before Steve Martin's 1994 `A Simple Twist of Fate' in a garishly modern Virginia/Georgia setting (no slight intended on the beauty of those fine States, but the tale is a frog in a barn in this locale) came Giles Foster's distinctly English and faithful adaptation for the BBC of one of George Eliot's own favourites. With ultimately its optimism and fair balance of life's trials and joys it is possibly more rewarding and life affirming than her bleak tragedy of `Mill on the Floss' or the hopelessness of intelligent women in the all encompassing English novel `Middlemarch'.The narrative centres on the misfortunes of a lowly weaver at the beginning of the nineteenth century living as an outcast, whose life eventually collides with a wealthy landowner and his seemingly altruistic benefactor. Silas Marner comes to Raveloe after being banished from a close-knit chapel community as a result of being falsely accused by a friend who steals his girlfriend to boot. Marner huddles himself up, keeping apart from the locals other than selling his woven goods to them, and thus he acquires a reputation as something of a witch with his trance like gaze resulting from cataleptic fits. Mind you, he is fortunate in managing to fashion a living out of weaving at a time when industrialisation left the majority of weavers and knitters short of work. After the gold he has frugally amassed suddenly disappears he is mysteriously blessed in the form of a golden bundle of treasure who wanders into his cottage one snowy night. Marner adopts the young girl in the absence of any other parental claim and brings her up, with the pecuniary assistance of the local squire, so that she regards him closer than any blood father. When the squire's wife Nancy fails to produce a child of her own and the truth about the missing gold is unearthed, the squire is forced to bring his own secret into the light.George Eliot's use of the mechanical trade of weaver with its lowly position in society was undoubtedly influenced by Shakespeare's creation of Bottom who has gentler indignities lumped upon him in `A Midsummer Night's Dream'. The indolent but not wholly bad young squire, with an unfortunate marriage attempting to hinder him from making a new life with another to provide him with an heir for the Red House, brings to mind the not dissimilar troubles of Edward Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's `Jane Eyre' published fourteen years earlier in 1847. It is also pertinent to note that having been rejected by one suitor, Herbert Spencer, as too morbidly intellectual the author made the difficult decision for the time to form a close and by all accounts loving relationship with George Lewes who was estranged from his wife following a sensational scandal concerning their domestic affairs. Jenny Agutter, the disgraced sassy spymaster in the BBC's BAFTA award winning hit `Spooks', splendidly inhabits the unworldly "rustic beauty" though sublimely goodly second wife Nancy Lammeter to Patrick Ryecart's feckless squire Godfrey Cass. Ben Kingsley, who had earlier won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gandhi and was outstanding as the canny accountant in Steven Spielberg's harrowing `Schindler's List', gives a perfect rendition as the strange and slightly spooky weaver, seeming to even possess his character's protruding eyes. Jim Broadbent makes an appearance as one of the villagers in a familiar trademark characterisation prior to his Oscar winning performance as the devoted husband John Bailey in `Iris'. The role of the older Eppy is taken by a pre rock star groupie Patsy Kensit, who as an actor is still memorable as the sensual and ultra cool, though soon to be iced, personal assistant in Lethal Weapon 2. She is currently starring alongside Nigel Havers in `See You Next Tuesday' in the West End's Albery Theatre. Presumably a fan of both author and actress, Giles Foster later transferred to screen another of George Eliot's novels `Adam Bede' (1991) in which he also cast Kensit.Eliot's strict religious upbringing that she eventually overthrew gives her an authoritative perspective on theology and philosophy for this tale of pious church elders unfairly expelling Marner from their circle. She also enters into a discourse on the merits or otherwise of adoption, playing devil's advocate that to challenge providence by wanting something that cannot be is to be against nature. For all her championing of social causes, history has not reverted to her real name as an author, Mary Ann (or Marian, as she preferred to be known) Evans, other than for her translation of Strauss' `Life of Jesus'.Although considered too morbidly intellectual by one of her suitors, Eliot has compassionate understanding and an extraordinary insight into human nature, enabling her expositions on social injustices to be left as a legacy for future generations. The surefooted transcription of this novel paved the way for the masterful `Middlemarch' in the mid 1990's and last year's `Daniel Deronda' (both adaptations from the historical romances' favourite dramatist, Andrew Davies) that brought more accessibility to her erudite tomes for those who may not have appreciated her work before. In a supportive scheduling role that also addressed the oversight in its Great Britons list, the BBC belatedly recognised her powerful influence on the creative world with a drama documentary. Although, rather confusingly with this portrayal, too much was made of her perceived plainness, especially with the choice of the excellent Harriet Walter, who, whilst empathetically delineating her character, rather belies the description. Walter was recently to be seen on screen in Stephen Fry's directing debut `Bright Young Things', and on tour of a few select English provincial theatres in Terrence Ratigan's `The Deep Blue Sea'.Silas Marner is a tale of the mysterious workings of life and how kindness and love can still be found in someone who has been betrayed and suffered at the hands of an unjust society. It is a worthy demonstration of how life can still bring rewards and riches greater than material wealth.

I am very surprised that there are no comments at all on this wonderful TV adaptation of one of George Eliot's thankfully shorter books. The plot of the book is rather melodramatic but it basically doesn't matter because the film concentrates on the strange and moving story of Silas himself, who falls into despair and becomes a recluse and miser when he is wrongly accused of a crime and is saved by the unexpected appearance in his life of a small child.Put this way, it sounds mawkish, but Silas is wonderfully handled by Ben Kingsley. He is a great actor who quietly inhabits every part he plays. The story is also about the importance of community. It is only when Silas becomes part of the village of Raveloe and its basically welcoming people that his life begins to turn around.I am a notorious weeper at movies and I cried a lot when I rented this, not at the sad bits but at the parts when Silas realises that he is not alone. For all those who like period movies (the late 18th century scene is well recreated) and character-driven plots.