Daniel Deronda

This article first appeared in The Age on May 17, 2003

Daniel Deronda (ABC, 8.35pm, Tomorrow night) reminds us that the English-speaking world has, in a massive act of denial, tried to cover up the how anti-Semitic England was before WW2. When this novel was written in the 1870s there were only 30,000 Jews living in Britain and the Oxford Dictionary reporting popular usage listed the verb "to Jew" defined as "to cheat or overreach".

Some would say that George Eliot, and her novel's adaptors, have overreached themselves in combining entertainment with meaning and a love story with politics. They haven't, though it lurches a bit with the figure of Mordecai (Daniel Evans), a mad msytic who verges on caricature. He was, though, based on a real figure, Emmanuel Deutsch, a Jewish scholar who was a close friend of Eliot's and introduced her to Zionism.

Daniel Deronda is startling, lush television. It predicts the founding of Israel some 70 years before it came into being, proposes as a happy ending for its heroine a life without a man, and for its hero a life of radical politics.

It makes sense that a story about secrets, bigotry and unknown origins should be written by a woman who was a feminist in far harsher times than these and who used a man's pseudonym as her pen name. Her gorgeous young hero is similarly afflicted by a narrow-minded world and uncertain origins.

The first episode focuses less on racism and more on a women's lot, beginning with the moment Daniel Deronda (Hugh Dancy) locks eyes with the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth (Romola Garai) over a roulette wheel. She's a young women who likes money and the effect she has over men. Despite her obvious passion for Daniel she responds to the advances of the evil Henleigh Grandcourt (Hugh Bonneville) even though she knows he has a mistress (Greta Scacchi) and three children. These events propel Gwendolen and Daniel on their separate, though overlapping, journies of self discovery.

This four episode series serves to illustrate that only by being true to one's self can one live a life worth having. But it makes its point without moralising. There is great understanding for the selfish Gwendolen's dilemma - what is a women to do in a world where she is denied any means of independent support? There is sympathy too for Daniel's confused passivity. I suspect Andrew Davies' adaptation of the novel is one reason why the character's are drawn so finely, but the wonderful performance help as well. I had a particular fondness for seeing Hugh Bonneville play, against type, a villian who is nasty, sexy and cold. And he does so with greater subtlty than that other great actor of bastards, John Malkovich. Edward Fox, who plays Daniel's adoptive father gives a most restrained and moving performance.

Daniel Deronda is an odd story in which major characters and plot lines are introduced by the strangest of happenstance. In a way the structure of the story is biblical, with many events having a symbolic power that overcomes the lack of narrative logic - such as when Daniel Deronda scoops a young stranger, Mirah Lapidoth (Jodhi May), from the river before she drowns herself. Mirah is Jewish and a talented singer. Like Daniel, she is uncertain of her parentage. It is in searching for Mirah's origins that Daniel comes closer to discovering his own, in a series of events which defy logic, but engage the heart.

Posted by Sophie at 02:33 PM