The Movie Project: Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The not-so-happy couple: Arthur and Helen

As if I needed another project for this blog! BUT, one of my big passions along with reading is great period movies and it's a bonus if they happen to have some literary connection. So, inspired by a fabulous blog that I visit - Lights, Camera, History - I've decided to take on their period drama challenge and adapt it to my blog here. I've selected the category of Victorian Mist and will try to review 8 movies from the Victorian era that are also in some way related to literature - either based on a book or that feature well known fictional or literary characters.

The first movie I selected was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall based on the novel of the same name by Anne Bronte. I watched the film almost immediately after reading the novel which might have been a bit of a mistake as the discrepancies between the book and the film were very glaring to me.

The story opens with Helen, a beautiful and mysterious a widow with a small child, arriving to live in a small village. Her unconventional lifestyle - painting to make a living - instantly captures the attention of the entire town. Gilbert, a local landowner, in particular develops an intense attachment. The rest of the town is not so generous and Helen soon becomes the target of vicious gossip. Through a series of events it is revealed that Helen is not a widow after all - instead she is in hiding from her worthless and dissolute husband Arthur Huntingdon. At this point the story shifts to Helen's point of view and shows how she came to be in such a predicament - from the whirlwind courtship to the steady decline and eventual ruin of her marriage.

As a novel, it was a fairly powerful story that exposes some fundamental social problems of the day - i.e. how little power women had over their own destinies. As a movie I felt it dragged on too long and didn't really capture the feel of the novel. It seemed to lack subtlety overall and I felt that Tara Fitzgerald as Helen in particular was miscast. Fitzgerald struck me as too mousy and angsty to play the subdued and mysterious Helen. On the other hand I thought Rupert Graves (Forsyte Saga) was an excellent Arthur Huntingdon. It's hard to play a character that starts off charming and eventually becomes completely repulsive and he pulls it off. Toby Stephens (Jane Eyre) is convincing as the lovesick Gilbert - not a particularly memorable performance, but then again he's not a very memorable character. But since Helen is the heart and soul of this story she's the one that should have been spot on. And finally, I was really disappointed with how the ending varied from the novel. It didn't add anything to change it up and was surprising considering how faithful the rest of the adaptation was.

My conclusion is that I highly recommend the book over the film, but isn't that always the case? All in all, the movie is not horrible and I believe if I hadn't read the book so recently that I might have been able to get past the length and miscasting issues. Still recommended for fans of the Brontes and strong period dramas.