NJO---September 1998

"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" provides sophisticated entertainment

By Steve Hedgpeth

The latest of British TV's lavish literary adaptations is in many ways the anti-"Tom Jones."

"Tess of the D'Urbervilles," a splendid, four-hour version of Thomas Hardy's novel that airs on A Sunday and Monday nights at 9, stands in sharp contrast to "Tom Jones," which aired on A last spring.

Where "Tom Jones" was comic, boisterous, sexy and sunny, "Tess" is tragic and dark, with vistas heavy on the overcast.

Justine Waddell - unknown here except for a supporting role in "The Woman in White," a British TV film that aired on PBS last year - is smashing as Tess Durbeyfield, a comely, energetic lass from a poor family who is urged by her parents to seek her fortune from wealthy relatives.

It is a decision that leads to misery for almost everyone involved, including Tess and the two men who love her in quite different ways - the rich and rapacious Alec D'Urberville (Jason Flemyng), and the fair-haired idealist Angel Clare (Oliver Milburn).

Though very much a '90s woman - she listened to Sheryl Crow, the Verve and Prodigy while on the set - the 22-year-old Waddell nonetheless found herself relating wholeheartedly to a 19th-century girl.

"It was such an exciting role, a huge canvas where I could paint every color I wanted," Waddell has said. "I loved (Tess') mixture of strength and weakness, courage and of humility. Tess is an extraordinary paradox. Every emotion I'd felt as a teenager was in there. It was a real rite of passage."

The script is the work of Ted Whitehead, best known here for writing the Robbie Coltrane series "Cracker." While "Tess" is largely a novel set in rural England, Whitehead is a Liverpool native who admits to "very little knowledge of or feeling for the countryside." Yet he found Hardy's "intensely cinematic" novel a great boon in imagining the landscape of Tess' tale.

"(The novel) was first published as a serial, so there is a gripping storyline with plot twists and cliffhangers every chapter or so," says Whitehead. "But that was true of all Victorian novels. What is unique here is (Hardy's) cinematic perspective: switching constantly from the close-up scrutiny of character, to the medium-long shots of people interacting socially, to the panorama of the countryside and of the skies above."

Still, despite Hardy's descriptive brilliance, Whitehead was somewhat reluctant to take the assignment, fearing that the two main male characters, Angel and Alec, were steeped in Victorian melodrama.

Says Whitehead, "I worried that contemporary audience might find Alec, the bewhiskered seducer, a bit of a joke, and Angel, the earnest prig, just a pain in the (butt). Hardy plays a risky and complicated game here: He deliberately sets up Alec as the baddie and Angel as the goodie, only to reverse our expectations by eventually revealing his real target, which is the hypocritical male double standard of the day that enables Angel to condemn Tess, but forgive himself for identical weaknesses. So I followed this faithfully, but tried to emphasize the hidden tensions and contradictions within the two male characters."

Whitehead did not rely at all on Roman Polanski's 1982 big-screen version of "Tess," a highly regarded epic that starred Nastassja Kinski in a star-making role.

"I avoided it," says Whitehead, "so I'd be free to do what I liked."

Which included conferring with director Ian Sharp and producer Sarah Wilson about casting once the screenplay was finished.

"I was able to discuss the problems concerning Alec and Angel in particular with the director and producer," he says. "So I think Alec is played with an underlying insecurity which offsets his caddish image, while Angel has a naturally warm smile which dilutes his priggishness.

"Justine Waddell doesn't have the ripe, voluptuous quality of Tess in the novel. What she does have is a fine, sensitive beauty and a sense of hauteur, like a young Katharine Hepburn, that marks her out as special. ... I think her sense of spirited independence makes her a very modern Tess."