The most interesting thing about the novel Sons and Lovers,
an early work by D.H. Lawrence, is that it is nearly an autobiography.
Lawrence's own parents were severely mismatched. His father was a barely
literate miner and his mother was a schoolteacher who resented the hand life
dealt her, which was to raise children in a grim, impoverished, uncultured
mining community while her husband spent every day in the pits and every night
in the pubs. Lacking any meaningful communication with her husband, she poured
all of her dreams into her children, and seemed to form a quasi-sexual
relationship with her sons.
David (D.H.) turned out as he did because of his mother's
solicitous if overprotective attentions. The good news is that he
eventually escaped the humble mining town of Eastwood and became
one of the most famous
authors of the 20th century. That was certainly no small achievement. The
bad news is that he was a mama's boy, which got him ridiculed by men and
caused him to fail in his early attempts to relate to women, since he could
never escape the domineering influence of his mother. Fortunately, he
possessed the intellect and objectivity necessary to realize the problematic
nature of his relationship with his mother, and he was able to turn it into
literature, capturing the best and worst elements of her influence with
remarkable candor in Sons and Lovers.
The second most interesting thing about the book is that
you've never actually read it unless you are truly a dedicated scholar. Even
if you think you have read it, you probably have not. I was completely
surprised this morning to find myself in this group. As I was researching this
article today, I discovered for the first time that the uncensored work was
never really seen until 1994, which meant I had not read it since I had not
revisited the novel since my college days in the 1960s. Oh, there was a
version of it out there for me to read, but not the version Lawrence wrote.
E-notes reports: "Edward
Garnett, a reader for Duckworth, Lawrence’s publisher, cut about 10 percent of
the material from Lawrence’s draft. Garnett tightened the focus on Paul by
deleting passages about his brother, William, and toning down the sexual
content. In 1994, Cambridge University Press published a new edition with all
of the cuts restored, including Lawrence’s idiosyncratic punctuation." Oh,
well. I have read it now, since
it is
available online in its entirety, or
available in summarized
form.
I don't think I was really missing much all these years.
You can pick up a complete, concise
plot summary from
Wikipedia. The short version is this: Paul (the surrogate for Lawrence
himself) is torn between the chaste, religious, and simple country woman who
loves him and a modern, freethinking married suffragette who wants him for
extramarital hanky-panky. Ultimately he is unable to relate very well to
either woman because of his Oedipal relationship with his own mother, and
mum's constant meddling in his romantic affairs.
There had previously been a relatively chaste film version
of the novel made in 1960 with an American (Dean Stockwell) in the lead. It
was directed by the famous cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who had a brief
directing career in the 1960s and 70s before returning to cinematography full
time. Cardiff did a good enough job in the director's chair that his version
of Sons and Lovers won him an Oscar nomination as the best director that year.
He has also been nominated three times in his life for the cinematography
Oscar, winning for Black Narcissus way back in 1947, which was near the
beginning of an astounding 70-year film career that continues to this day.
Cardiff's version of Sons and Lovers was nominated for seven Oscars in all,
including best picture, and won for its impressive cinematography.
The BBC turned Sons and Lovers into a mini-series in the
1980s, and that version was seen in the United States on Masterpiece Theater.
(Although not by me. I don't even remember that there was such a thing.)
ITV1 conceived of their 2003 version as an opportunity to
interpret the work for the first time without censorship, presenting the
sexual scenes as explicitly as Lawrence might have imagined them, and working
for the first time with the full text from the uncensored 1994 release of the
novel. The network threw a great deal of money into this production ($8
million), since they believed in the project's appeal for at least two
reasons. First there was the element of name recognition. "Sons and Lovers" is
one of the most widely recognized book titles in history. It was the most
popular of Lawrence's works during his own lifetime, and
The Modern Library list rated it among the ten best novels of the century.
Second there was the story's suitability for British television, combining as
it does period costumes, solemn dialogue, an established literary reputation,
and explicit sex - the perfect combination to provide housewives with
guilt-free titillation.
The author did a good job of working around Lawrence's
stiff, windy dialogue. He either made it more terse and natural or eliminated
it altogether, substituting pauses and glances whenever he could. Until the
last fifteen minutes, I thought the film had done a great job of interpreting
and pictorializing Lawrence's work, except that the setting seemed too
sanitary. Given that the story took place in a mining and farming community, I
was astounded to see that it was never grim or grimy. These manual laborers
managed to keep themselves, their clothing, and their abodes quite clean and
salutary except for an occasional smudge of dirt on their cheeks. Perhaps that
was because this version was filmed on the Isle of Man (except for the
old-fashioned railway station, which is actually in Yorkshire), while the 1960
film was shot on location in Nottinghamshire, where the narrative actually
took place.
In adapting the novel to the screen, the scriptwriter
eliminated one character and made another one-dimensional, both to good
overall effect. The character of Paul's younger brother, Arthur, has been
written completely out of this version. This was, in my opinion, an inspired
piece of condensation on the scriptwriter's part, because the Arthur subplots
really add nothing to the story and serve only to distract us from the four
central characters. (Paul, his two lovers, and his mother.) The character of
Paul's miner father is still present throughout the story, but has been
reduced to an abstraction. While Trevor Howard had breathed life into the
character in the 1960 movie, and received an Oscar nomination for his role,
the actor's only job in this version is to stare ominously and
uncommunicatively. Although he is always somewhere on the periphery of the
story, he has virtually no dialogue in the second half, thus focusing the
story completely on Paul (D.H. Lawrence's alter ego). This was a good move in
terms of economy and focus, although it lost some opportunities to provide
dimension to the father by showing that he was not as shallow as his family
seemed to believe. The elimination of the younger brother and the reduction of
the father's role did not eliminate anything important while giving the other
characters the screen time necessary to explore their relationships in depth.
Everything was going along well until that last fifteen
minutes I mentioned earlier. I don't know what happened there. The
scriptwriter just sort of went off the track at the very end. Each of Paul's
relationships with his two lovers ends with a slightly different spin than
Lawrence had imparted. Since the film had been quite faithful to the novel up
to that point, I assume that the author had to have had some specific point in
mind when he made the changes, but I can't pick up on it. I honestly can't
give you any reasons why the changes were made, although the revised farewell
scenes seem to be neither better nor worse than Lawrence's, but merely
different, and I have no objection to what he did to end Paul's two affairs.
The very last scene was another matter entirely. Paul sits
in a pastoral setting and reminisces to himself, seeing a rosy-tinted version
of the past, as played out by a repeat of earlier footage. This trite
narrative technique seemed strangely out of synch with the rest of the story,
and totally outside the realm of Lawrence's inspiration, and feels like it was
tacked on to add some warmth and a more hopeful tone. I wasn't comfortable
with it. The word "corny" comes to mind.
There is a lot of nudity, and of the full-frontal variety at
that, but it's all in the second half. In my opinion the story takes too long
to get to the sex and nudity - more than two hours elapse before the "modern
woman" character seduces Paul by coming naked into his room. If you are
interested in the flesh, you can literally skip Part 1 entirely! Once it
starts, however, the nudity is virtually non-stop, taking only an occasional
break for the requisite scenes of squalor, death and misery which persuade us
that the project is weighty enough to justify our ogling some attractive flesh.
In addition to the female nudity shown below, Rupert Evans
shows full frontal and rear nudity.
If you're scoring at home, part 1 of the series is a C-. It
would be of no interest to anyone not already predisposed to be interested in
the source material or in this type of stodgy period piece. It has no nudity,
and does a lot of stage-setting involving minor characters. Part 2 is much
better. At least a C. Maybe a C+. It is livelier, has more plot development,
concentrates on the central relationships, and has many, many minutes of very
sexy nudity.
Call it a C for the whole deal: good acting, good production
values, a solid offering for the Masterpiece Theater crowd, but too windy and
soapy to interest mainstream viewers.
I'll have the collages ready for tomorrow. In the meantime,
here are the film clips