Bleak House
May 2006 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

In 1852-53, Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House in 20 episodes that were serialized monthly. He wrote them quickly in longhand, leaving inkblots and illegible words. Here we are a century and a half later, serializing Bleak House again into almost as many episodes for an impeccable Masterpiece Theatre production -- not a blot anywhere. Screenwriter Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, 1995) has tamed the wild, convoluted plot into 15 coherent episodes, each with a cliff-hanging ending. Dickens himself would have been spellbound with this production.

Bleak House concerns Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a case in the Chancery Courts over a will. Who among the many claimants are the legitimate heirs to a vast inheritance? The case has dragged on so long the original litigants are dead. Two young orphaned heirs, Richard and Ada (Patrick Kennedy and Carey Mulligan), and their young chaperone Esther (Anna Maxwell Martin) are turned over by Chancery to be wards of John Jarndyce of Bleak House (Denis Lawson). He welcomes them to his estate and warns Richard and Ada not to let the hope of a grand inheritance take over their lives. But Richard is bitten and spends what little he has on lawyers. Ada and Richard fall in love, obsessed though he is. Esther longs to unravel the mystery of her lost mother. John Jarndyce, a lonely man, proposes to Esther, who is 20 years younger than he is. From these slender threads, a vast, fascinating plot is woven.

Dickens once observed that "the one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself." That indictment is convincingly dramatized by this production. Dickens loved a broad canvas peopled with eccentrics and teeming with action. The plot and subplots quickly unfold and interweave. One unforgettable character after another appears -- from Jo, a homeless boy living in the polluted streets, to Mr. Guppy, aspiring law clerk, all the way up to the splendid isolation of Lord and Lady Dedlock (Gillian Anderson -- yes, of X-Files fame). Nathaniel Parker as the unprincipled opportunist Mr. Skimpole will exasperate you. Charles Dance as the heartless but powerful lawyer Tulkinghorn will turn your blood cold. Anna Maxwell Martin, Dickens’ narrator character, will comfort and soothe you. The acting is the best you’ll see anywhere.

Warning: It may take an episode or two to get committed. The look of the production is dark, sometimes even murky. With time, you come to realize the look is deliberate and appropriate. If you watched the series on PBS, you saw it in six weeks in segments of an hour, with an extra hour the first and final weeks. On the DVD, the episodes are arranged into half-hours, as they aired in Britain. So many actors and accents mean that you have to listen up to catch the dialogue, and you can. The musical score is lovely and habit-forming -- you’ll want to go on hearing it. There are no bonus features, but PBS provides plenty of extras on its companion website: www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/bleakhouse/.

This Bleak House can restore your faith in television.

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