I don’t tend to like most Dickens adaptations. Or rather, most Dickens adaptations are fine, they often contain excellent casts of veteran character actors in beautiful costumes, but they always ring a little hollow for me. That is, of course, because the thing that makes Dickens Dickens, the thing that resonates is not the plot or even the characters. Rather the thing that makes Dickens Dickens is the style.

Bleak House is probably the best example of this problem. The novel has had several well-executed BBC adaptations with performances by gifted actors: Dame Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock in the 1985 series and Charles Dance as Mr. Tulkinghorn in the 2005 series are both particularly good. Still as stunning as the performances are, and as well-built as the sets are, and as true to the form as the costumes are, they ultimately lose their true resonance, because they lose the most important thing about Dickens, the amazing style of his language. It is a style which John R. Reed has recently characterized as “hyperreal,” and while I don’t entirely agree with this description I think it comes closer to defining Dickens’s particular style than many others do. Still, I prefer to turn to Dickens himself to pinpoint exactly how to characterize his style. In his introduction to the first single-volume edition of Bleak House Dickens writes: “In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” It should not surprise us that Robert Newsom examined this particular phrase in depth in his excellent 1977 monograph, for it is I think, the clear key to Dickens’s particular resonance.

A quick example:

This is how the 2005 BBC miniseries begins:
 

 
Once the credits finish up we get a nice atmospheric picture of London, and then move to the doldrums of Chancery. Again, very well-made, nothing to object to. But, compare it to Dickens’s opening: “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” These are the first words of the novel and they immediately locate us in London, giving us the date and the weather in a clipped journalistic style. But that journalistic attitude shifts immediately into a robust, yet still related, tone invoking figurative devices and simile. Just this one sentence points to what the television adaptation cannot capture, that in-between point of view that hovers between imagination (what could be) and reality (what is). Newsom calls these dual perspectives “the real eye and the mind’s eye.”

Dickens goes on in the next paragraph to describe the fog:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Dickens is not just articulating that it is foggy, but rather he is doing something else with this description. Here he is connecting all of these disparate foggy places by presenting the fog as a linkage, one which has its center at the major heart of corruption in the novel, the Court of Chancery: “And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” The 1985 production does its best to reconstruct this foggy landscape–London in this version is shrouded in thick layers of pea-soup direct from the fog machine–but it takes the presence of Dickens’s language to make the moral connections he invests the fog with.

Now, I know that literature and film are two different mediums with different strengths and weaknesses. It is impossible to ask a film to preserve the specifically textual qualities of a text. However, so much of Dickens is bound up in those textual qualities as to make film translation especially difficult.

This I think is why my favorite Dickens adaptation is actually Alphonso Cuarón’s 1998 version of Great Expectations:
 

Unlike other Dickens adaptations that are rigidly set in Dickens’s Victorian time-period and thus tend to subordinate their own styles to a general costume drama aesthetic, Cuarón’s take employs its own visual sense. This is paired with music drawn from 90’s alternative rock, and it works surprisingly well. There is for instance, a brilliant scene wherein Finn (the transmuted Pip from the original novel) sketches Estella in a frenzy set to the strains of Pulp’s “Like a Friend.” Because he is not dogmatically attached to a model that seeks the impossible task of reproducing the original text note for note, Cuarón is able to imbue the work with a freshness and a vision that most other Dickens adaptations lack. Cuarón’s color palette, cool blues and greens give the film a consistent structured visual style that also helps to create the sense of a larger coherence. The transformation of Pip into Finn and the the relocation to the Florida Gulf Coast and New York also create a kind of freshness that the slavish costume dramas often miss. The backwater fishing town Finn inhabits is a worthwhile replacement for the village Pip comes from, while New York easily stands in for London. All of this comes together to create an adaptation that catches the spirit of Dickens in a way that many other adaptations do not.

I don’t think it is surprising that the most adapted to Dickens’s works is A Christmas Carol. It is far easier to subordinate Dickens’s fantastic style to the fantastic elements of ghosts than it is to filmicaly locate it in tangled Victorian bureaucracies and the London squalor. A Christmas Carol also allows for a tremendous amount of exuberance, something that is heavily apparent in Dickens’s style if not always his matter. That perhaps is also what is right about Cuarón’s Great Expectations, it feels passionate. Maybe it is because Dickens’s work itself has become so familiar, that it takes another kind of directorial eye, to make it once again romantic.