TV on Blu-ray Review: The Casual Vacancy (2015)

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A contemporary Dickensian tragicomic tale of two communities and thirty-four characters, 2012's The Casual Vacancy may not have been part of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular Harry Potter series but that didn't stop the BBC and HBO from securing the rights to develop the U.K.'s fastest-selling novel in three years.

No stranger to weaving socioeconomic and political themes into Potter's fantastical coming-of-age storylines, as a book targeted to adults instead of children Vacancy offered Rowling the opportunity to do more than just shed a little light on the issues about which she was passionate.

Digging deeper into the topic of class warfare including its main byproduct of prejudice, in the novel Rowling likened the situation to a sort of suburban apartheid set in a west country town (likely modeled on her birthplace of Yate, Gloucestershire).

Yet determined not to lose herself in political theory, she took a cue from Potter and instead focused on her brilliantly conceived characters. Delving into the difference a small election could make in the lives and futures of the well-to-do Pagford community that's largely populated by those that wish to permanently separate from the poor residents living in the neighboring council estate dubbed The Fields, Rowling explores this from all sides to bring her concerns vibrantly to life.

Rather than voting to make The Fields part of the nearby city once and for all, the miniseries enhances the dramatic impact by paring the issue down even further so that the future a vital local community center becomes the focal point of the Pagford Parrish Council election.

Offering not just a safe haven for the children in both communities (especially those in the impoverished, drug dominated Fields) but also an all-important methadone and health clinic that's much easier for recovering addicts to visit than the one only accessible by unreliable bus service in the city, the aptly named Sweetlove House serves as a important humanistic symbol throughout the work.

And after the death of the beloved council member Barry Fairbrother (well played by Rory Kinnear), who was raised in The Fields but – thanks to the opportunities available with social welfare programs and places like Sweetlove House – went on to become a respected champion for civil rights in Pagford, the community center becomes a permanent reminder of Barry for the rest of the miniseries.

With his seat newly up for grabs and the Council suddenly missing their voice of reason, Pagford descends into chaos, especially after an unknown hacker calling themselves "The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother" begins posting the town's dirty secrets on the Council's website to expose the hypocrisy of those trying to claim his seat for the upcoming election.

Hoping to close the community center and instead build a tourist destination spa in its place (despite the fact that most of its neighboring locals wouldn't be able to afford it), the wealthiest and most powerful Pagford residents try to scheme their way to a victory, oblivious to the fact that everyone has something to hide and Barry's ghosts are watching.

Given Rowling's love of the classics, it's only fitting that veteran BBC miniseries scripter Sarah Phelps (known for the channel's recent critically acclaimed presentation of Great Expectations) was tapped to adapt Rowling's ambitious tome.

Staying true to Rowling's character-driven roots, although The Casual Vacancy is anchored by a large ensemble cast including the phenomenal Abigail Lawrie whose deceptively tough, battle-scarred sixteen-year-old Fields resident Krystal Weedon is the heart of the miniseries, Phelps tactfully cuts out the novel's excess.

Merging some characters into one while removing others completely, perhaps most impressively the screenwriter reconfigured key players in order to ensure everything harks back to the most important issues that Rowling longed to get across.

Although the jump from satirical SNL sketch worthy supporting roles to achingly real portraits of those who could easily be your friends and neighbors feels a bit jarring, Casual is at its best when it abandons the Potter-like players and delivers fly-on-the-wall docudrama.

Understanding that, Phelps sharpens her take on book even more, letting Rowling's stunningly crafted, flawed yet fascinating characters lead the way to terrific, often heartbreaking effect.

While some of the film's plot points are a tad too predictable and after the first episode far too much time is spent on unlikable characters that fail to move the plot forward, all in all, it's an intelligently crafted work which (like Animal Farm or The Wizard of Oz) takes an inventive approach to political allegory.

And this production is timelier than ever – not only for Americans gearing up for the exhausting mudslinging that goes along with a presidential election – but also relatable on a global scale for the clever way that Rowling's small town war can be applied to any number of settings and situations.

However, just like certain aspects of the satire fail to translate from the page, Phelps made an incredibly smart decision to rewrite the devastatingly heavy-handed, Thomas Hardy style ending that may have come off as far too hopeless on the screen.

Understanding that the viewer needs to be able to see the ways in which ignorance, apathy, bureaucracy, fear, and prejudice have failed its characters in order to fully appreciate not only what went wrong but also what went right (and how it could've stayed that way), Phelps's more affecting bittersweet coda reminds us of the basic good in people.

Reassuring us that it's never too late to try and fight for what's right (even if you're outnumbered and going it alone), the superbly crafted film helmed by Jonny Campbell plays better as a three hour feature than a three part miniseries.

Bolstered by top notch production values, Vacancy's strong cast and crew meets the screenplay halfway, abridging Rowling's epic with clever costuming, production design, and cinematography that aids in our understanding of this tale of two communities and way too many subplots through visual storytelling.

An extremely polished yet meandering miniseries that mirrors the state of Pagford after the death of Fairbrother by temporarily losing its way after the exceptionally crafted first installment, despite a few missteps, Vacancy finds its footing again and again.

Text ©2015, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

TV on DVD: Agatha Christie's Marple -- Series 4 (2008)

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Following the retirement of actress Geraldine McEwan who portrayed Agatha Christie's brilliantly subtle "spinster" sleuth in the three previous seasons of ITV's successful series, Cranford and Notes on a Scandal actress Julia McKenzie took up the knitting needles and inquisitive mind embodied in Agatha Christie's Marple.

With the release of its fourth series that coincides with the broadcast of the included works here in the states as part of PBS's Masterpiece Mystery!, once again we're presented with a quartet of high quality adaptations of feature-length standalone mysteries breathtakingly captured in cinematic 16x9 widescreen format and presented with Dolby Digital sound.

Routinely clocking in at a breakneck 93 minute running time, McKenzie is joined by a top-notch cast of familiar faces in supporting roles including Matthew Macfadyen, Joan Collins, Shirley Henderson, Rupert Graves, Anna Chancellor, Jemma Redgrave, Brian Cox, Helen Baxendale, Prunella Scales, Warren Clarke, Natalie Dormer, Rafe Spall, Samantha Bond and Liz White.

In the set, Miss Jane Marple seeks to unmask the murderer(s) in the four given mysteries that comprise the series (A Pocket Full of Rye, Murder is Easy, They Do It With Mirrors, and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?) as well as their modus operandi which are typically revealed in Christie fashion with a mind-boggling denouement. Although fortunately for our sake, the Marple explanations always make far more sense to viewers than the ones rattled off (sometimes) via thirty minute near monologues by David Suchet's Hercule Poirot.

However, while Poirot was able to overhear conversations and happen upon clues by sitting quietly in rooms much like Miss Jane Marple who seems to hide behind knitting as part of her drawing room mystery camouflage-- one major difference between Christie's two greatest and most popular detectives was that Marple was far less vain. Unlike Poirot, Marple needed none of the man's glory nor the title of "the greatest detective in the world," since in some cases, once she's cracked a complicated puzzle in her roundabout way, she simply disappears from the scene before the guilty party is even apprehended.

While she always fears the worst whenever she's brought in, she stumbles onto cases typically as a guest or when asked to put her amateur sleuthing skills to good use by a friend or acquaintance. Although Marple fans may recall her as a cynical, tough-minded woman who doesn't faint at the sight of corpses or being held up at gunpoint in a standoff with an unstable suspect and we do see some of those qualities here, overall McKenzie's approach to Marple feels different. Basically it's a bit more cheerful and mumbling yet self-consciously meek and therefore McKenzie's Marple as penned by the screenwriters adapting Christie's work for the four different directors employed for the titles in question at first seems like she's acting in stark contrast to the woman we've known on the page and in previous films.

However, quickly we discover that instead of the Marple portrayed by some as a bit pushier and insistent-- especially when dealing with the authorities-- our new Jane Marple operates on the simple truth that people will tell an old woman anything. Throughout these four feature films, Marple is ultimately a clever confidant who is instantly trustworthy because of her soft-spoken demeanor and the way that she instinctively seems to know just when to ask certain questions at that eventually leads to solving the most difficult of cases.

In quintessential Christie fashion-- inspired no doubt by the author's background in pharmacology work-- poisons are used repeatedly throughout the series and the body count often grows from one corpse to several such as in the wickedly named Murder is Easy when people begin dropping like the local bees kept at the vicarage in a way that makes us realize they must have stung someone the wrong way and died as a result.

Although unfortunately the decision to pair these particular four mysteries together might not have been the best one from a storyteller's point-of-view since all four involve the same type of secret, motive, and individual(s) that leads to the killings-- making one wonder why Christie was so fixated on the issue and why all four past secrets led to evil-- overall it's a solid and satisfying collection. However, due to the familiarity of the concluding link that occurs in the first, second, third, and fourth volume consecutively-- despite the fact that of course, Christie gives them all wondrously unique twists, subplots, red herrings, and more surprises-- Agatha Christie's Marple perhaps works best viewed in the PBS like weekly format instead of as a marathon which makes the repetition that much more glaring.

Exquisitely photographed and with stunning period production design for the early 1950s set series where the wounds of World War II still haven't healed-- amazingly as works on their own there isn't a dud in the bunch. The series begins with the classic case of a wealthy man with more enemies than friends who is found poisoned at work. Yet when we learn that the man died also with a pocket filled with rye and there seems to be a strange clue involving the term "Blackbird," Marple works subtly alongside Matthew Macfayden's Inspector Neele when she discovers that her sweet but dim-witted maid Gladys who had begun working in the victim's crowded household has also perished in a gruesome fashion.

And in Murder is Easy, Marple is led to a seemingly idyllic village after she encounters a stranger on a train "accidentally" killed shortly after a curiously suspicious confession entices Marple to visit a tight-knit community where the death toll is on the rise as church pews begin emptying out. While she's again faced with multiple motives, UK film fans who are used to certain actors being typecast will immediately be able to identify the killer by the guest star portraying a resident. Although once again and similar to Rye, piecing together the clues into a final solution is a different story altogether for Marple, though luckily for us it's one that's much easier to comprehend than Rye's.

Once we've left the beauty of the English village, the last two titles-- They Do it With Mirrors and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?-- primarily take place indoors, giving us a sense of heightened suspicion and claustrophobia especially in the brilliant final mystery that livens things up by giving Marple two young aspiring sleuth sidekicks. Asked to investigate a strange fire at the sister's residence of Jane Marple's good friend played by Joan Collins, Marple journeys to the eccentric home of Ruth van Ryock to make sure that no danger is awaiting Ruth in Mirrors.

Further complicating Marple's visit is the rather large ensemble cast that's initially hard for audiences to keep straight. And to this end, we become acquainted with Ruth's life of ex-husbands and stepchildren-- some of whom are much older than she is herself-- and begin tallying up all of the possible perpetrators. It's a laundry list of suspects to say the least including a shell-shocked World War II veteran, a mentally unstable assistant who believes he's the son of Winston Churchill, along with a rehabilitation center filled with endless suspects given the fact that Ruth runs an adjacent facility for "reformed" citizens.

Aside from some scenes that had this reviewer with an Indiana Jones like fear of snakes desperately wanting to look away-- by far, the most unorthodox and original feature contained in the fourth series was the fourth volume of Why Didn't They Ask Evans? wherein a young man discovers a dying stranger stranded on the rocks of a cliff by the sea. As the young Bobby Attfield risks his own life to get to the victim, the dying man utters the five words that would be used for the title of the mystery but instead of informing the police about the strange utterance, the scared Bobby keeps this knowledge private.

Of course, that changes when a beautiful old friend from school named Frankie Derwent suggests that the two take up the case themselves. Soon in over their heads and posing as others at a creepy mansion connected to the deceased-- luckily for Bobby and Frankie-- Miss Marple arrives to assist the boy she's known since he was a child and more importantly help solve the case.

Again, while the same past mistakes and secrets twist is used repeatedly and in Murder is Easy especially some of the decisions made by the director in deciding when to let us in on a visual clue seemed a tad too early and obvious, all of the traditional Christie criticisms of an over-reliance on poisons, some characters who feel one-dimensional etc. is easily brushed aside thanks to the elegant and classy execution.

Although I wish that McKenzie's Marple had a little more spunk so that some of her triumphs and confidences shared resembled more determined investigation rather than the recurring nonchalant, "ah well, I'm old and people will talk to me" style of knowledge gathering, by the time Mirrors and Evans have rolled around you can see the actress visibly grow more accustomed to her role. And soon, McKenzie begins making Jane Marple slightly more confident in some memorable sequences during the comedic near-play like set-up of the fourth title.

A must-own for Christie fans and especially those, like me, who always enjoyed Marple more than Poirot when picking up one of the author's mystery novels-- the stellar craftsmanship and dedication of those in front of and behind the camera is apparent as soon as the works begin. And luckily for fans, we can already look forward to the arrival of more Marple as a fifth series has been ordered for ITV.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.