`Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones” is the very precise title of the latest A&E network foray into British literature, a name chosen presumably to keep the modern television viewer from tuning in expecting to find a Welshman singing about Samson’s haircut while dodging the frillies of female audience members.
Though such forget-me-nots would have pleased his randy hero, Fielding’s Tom Jones, of course, predates the sweaty lounge singer by two centuries.
Those who do tune in to the six-hour rendering of Fielding’s classic 1749 novel, a BBC coproduction airing over three nights (7 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday), will find in Sunday’s note-perfect first night the start of an immensely pleasurable romp and an endearing, enduring love story.
The movie doesn’t seem remotely musty, in part because Olde England, with its landed gentry and wills and bound bodices and primogeniture, is becoming such familiar territory to contemporary film buffs, but also because Fielding’s wit and sense of character feel modern.
The English novelist Kingsley Amis has observed that “(Fielding’s) humor is closer to our own than that of any writer before the present century,” and Graham Greene credited Fielding the storyteller with being a progenitor of not just Dickens, but also of Joyce and James as well.
And this retelling, directed by Metin Huseyin from an incisive screenplay by Simon Burke, hews as faithfully as time will allow to the nearly 1,000-page novel, a tale of the life of a bastard boy brought up in a good home and then cast out from it. It was originally titled “The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling.”
One of Burke’s great touches is the use of Fielding as a character, providing transitions and perspective and trying to narrate from a roadside while playful Tom rides by and knocks off his hat and wig.
It is an artful choice, a means of sharing the book’s delight in the tale it is telling and preserving the happily self-conscious author’s voice used to tell it.
“I think it proper to acquaint you that I intend to digress,” Fielding (John Sessions) says early.
And later in night one, Fielding gives voice to the novel’s edgy-for-the-time guiding principle: “There are those who teach that vice is the certain road to misery in this world and virtue to happiness. Very wholesome doctrine and one to which I have but one objection–namely, it is not true.”
Indeed, in the events leading up to the banishment, Tom (Max Beesley) proves himself both a good soul and no paragon of rectitude.
Born to an unmarried servant named Jenny Jones, he spends much of his youth pleading for, and receiving, mercy for various colorful transgressions from the man who takes him in, Squire Allworthy (Benjamin Whitrow).
But it is the machinations of Blifil (James D’Arcy), Allworthy’s nephew and heir, that lead to the squire finally and unfairly washing his hands of Tom, the conclusion of Sunday’s night one and the act that sends him out into the world to make or lose his way.
Blifil is clearly the dark one, a cold and calculating fish and, as played by D’Arcy, a magnetic mixture of cutthroat and effete.
Blifil wants Tom gone, not only to remove a rival for Allworthy’s fortune, but also so that Tom will be no obstacle to the marriage/business deal the families intend.
Sophia Western (Samantha Morton) is the only daughter of the owner of the neighboring estate. She and Tom are childhood playmates, and, of course, grow up achingly in love, but Squire Allworthy and Western want the estates combined, meaning, also of course, that she must marry Blifil.
Morton, from A&E’s “Jane Eyre” and “Emma,” is a superb Sophia, offering elegance and a more refined echo of her father’s violent temper.
She and newcomer Beesley, at the story’s center, are a glowing pair, though Beesley lacks something of the life force Tom ought to have.
But between their beauty, the bevy of great rubbery faces cast around them, and Fielding’s devastating way with character observation (and naming: Tom and Blifil’s pious tutors are the Rev. Thwackum and the philosopher Mr. Square), this production oozes humanity.
Brian Blessed as the humorously mercurial Squire Western, Sophia’s father, is like a Dr. Seuss drawing come to life, tossing back glasses of wine and working himself into high dudgeon at the drop of a rumor.
And Kathy Burke, as Sophia’s gossipy handmaid Honour, has a face like putty, lending comic punctuation to every urgent whisper.
I haven’t seen Tony Richardson’s 1963 big-screen version of “Tom Jones,” a much praised best picture winner starring Albert Finney, so I cannot draw comparisons.
Nor have I watched all six hours of this one yet. It could flag. But given what I know about the twists and turns of the story to come, and given how skillfully it is told at the outset, I feel confident my eagerness to get back to watching this will be well rewarded.
