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Style Weekly Online---September 8, 1998

Tess of the Disappointments

A&E fails at adapting Thomas Hardy’s sweeping work into a television miniseries.

By Don Dale

The two-part, four-hour TV adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is a treat for the eye, lushly photographed and beautiful to behold in its depiction of the English countryside of Hardy’s native Dorsetshire. And its three stars — Justine Waddell as Tess, Jason Flyming as Alec, and Oliver Milburn as Angel — are perfectly cast and assay their roles with surety and grace.

But it’s the script that dooms this British and American cooperative venture. At its best, the miniseries is poorly written. At its worst, it’s mere drivel. Given the chance to see this 1998 production — made some 70 years after his death — Hardy himself would be aghast at what’s been done to his novel.

The TV “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” not to be confused with the 1979 film titled simply “Tess,” is based on Hardy’s 1891 story, which, like his entire corpus of books and poetry, is pervaded by the picture of a world dominated by Charles Darwin’s determinism and Sir Isaac Newton’s 17th-century physics. Most of Hardy’s characters struggle valiantly but vainly — as does Tess — against their own nature and the world they live in. Indeed, in his novel, Hardy employs nature throughout as a tool to help him depict and extend Tess’ tragic fate. It is too simplistic merely to say that good things happen to Tess in the bright green days of summer, while bad things happen in the darkness and gloom of winter, for Hardy’s novel is too complex, and at the same time too compelling, to be so casually summarized.

Little if any of that complexity comes through in this extremely inferior television miniseries. The landscape is there, but no parallels are drawn. Summer and winter happen inexorably, but their deeper literary meanings are not explored. There is passion, but it has no more relevance than there is in an Erich Segal novel.

This TV version of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is merely the broadest outline of the Hardy novel — the story of a girl named Durbeyfield who is driven by her alcoholic father to seek help for the family from what he believes are his wealthy relatives, the D’Urbervilles. She is relentlessly pursued and finally seduced by the D’Urberville son, Alec. Tess escapes from his grasp and returns home only to discover that she is pregnant, but the child, whom she names Sorrow, dies in infancy. Tess leaves home once again and secures work as a milkmaid. There on the farm she meets a young man, Angel Clare. The two fall in love, but on their wedding night, she tells him of her past and he, devastated by her tale, leaves. Tess again seeks work in the harsh, rural countryside and chances once more upon Alec, with whom she agrees to live — but not without more tragedy.

It is difficult to summarize in a few words the sweeping, moralistic story found in Hardy’s novel. As difficult, perhaps, as it was to transform that monumental novel into a television miniseries — a task at which A&E has failed execrably.

“D’Urbervilles”

A&E

Sept. 13 and 14 at 9 p.m.

Repeats Sept. 18 and 19 at 9 p.m.

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