Little Dorrit (2)

This installment of Little Dorrit--or perhaps we should call it Somewhat-Taller-than-Average Dorrit, since the actress is thin but hardly short*--takes us to about book one, chapter twenty-nine.  It's harder to comment on this episode, because we're in the midst of several subplots without yet seeing where any of them are headed.  Andrew Davies exerts himself to render Amy Dorrit less of a doormat, as we can see when she reacts to her father's and her brother's begging letters.  In the original, she mournfully tells Clennam that she is "afraid" to be away from her father and brother, because "[w]hen I am gone, they pervert--but they don't mean it--even Maggy" (I.22); in Davies' version, she angrily tells Clennam that they cannot be friends as long as her family "sponges" off of him, and later chews out her brother for sneering at Clennam.  Dickens' Amy remains excruciatingly conscious of her father's "only moments of degradation" (I.14), but strains herself to think the best of him--even if she cannot always succeed.  Davies', though, champs at the bit with obvious frustration.  She loves her father, but neither idealizes him nor explains away his shortcomings; when William Dorrit breaks down in momentary humiliation, she pointedly comforts him from a distance instead of coddling him like a baby (as she does in the novel).  The only other significant twist on Dickens' original is, ironically enough, quoted directly from Dickens: when Miss Wade refers to Tattycoram as, among other things, a "slave," the term takes on more than figurative meaning now that Tattycoram is black. 

Most of the snappy camera work from the first installment (episodes 1-3) has gone by the wayside, even though 2/3 of what we saw this evening was shot by the same director.  Nevertheless, the prison bar motif remains, manifesting itself in ways both predictable (an iron fence) and not (harpstrings).  The directors do their best to make Amy seem shorter than she actually is, primarily by shooting her from above. 

*--Amy Dorrit is supposedly so tiny that she can be mistaken for a child.