James Ivory's screen version of "A Room with a View" has always been one of my favourite films, (I'm a hopeless romantic; now I'm out of the closet), so I approached this television version with some trepidation and for the first twenty minutes or so I was sure I was right; they should leave well enough alone. But then the power of the original novel began to exert itself. And so did the casting. I was never that happy with Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands as the young lovers in the Ivory version, (she simpered; he was gorgeous in a big, dumb hunk kind of way but Sands was also a shade too upper-crust for a working class lad). Here Elaine Cassidy caught the rebellious spirit of Lucy from the off while Rafe Spall seemed to me to be authentically working-class while his real-life father Timothy was simply magnificent in the role of his screen father, Mr Emerson. Laurence Fox, too, was far more recognizably human and less of a caricature than Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse. Best of all, in the crucial role of Miss Barlett, Sophie Thompson succeeded in banishing all memories of Maggie Smith and made the part her own. Thompson could now write an encyclopedic textbook on how to play nervous embarrassment. So the casting worked and the first hurdle of replicating a beloved original was overcome.
But there were three other crucial differences between this version and Ivory's. Firstly the story is told in flashback as Lucy returns to Florence on her own in 1922. Why is she alone? The clue, of course, is in the year and the ending makes explicit what we may have already guessed. Secondly there is a coda, very nicely done, that seems to set out a happy future for her and thirdly, perhaps you may think unnecessarily, scriptwriter Andrew Davies introduces a sub-text that implies that both Cecil and Mr Beebe, the kindly, match-making vicar played camply by Simon Callow in the Ivory version and by Mark Williams in a much more restrained way here, are gay. Blink and you may well miss the inference and may wonder exactly what Mr Beebe is referring to when later he says that Cecil is not the marrying kind. It is, of course, only one reading into the behaviour of both these characters but it certainly goes some way to explaining the character of Beebe, if not always Cecil. And it ensures that this adaptation is not simply a slavish copy of the James Ivory version.
Did I prefer it to Ivory's version? Well, not exactly but it held me in its velvet glove of a grip right to the end and finally it moved in a really quite unexpected fashion.
But there were three other crucial differences between this version and Ivory's. Firstly the story is told in flashback as Lucy returns to Florence on her own in 1922. Why is she alone? The clue, of course, is in the year and the ending makes explicit what we may have already guessed. Secondly there is a coda, very nicely done, that seems to set out a happy future for her and thirdly, perhaps you may think unnecessarily, scriptwriter Andrew Davies introduces a sub-text that implies that both Cecil and Mr Beebe, the kindly, match-making vicar played camply by Simon Callow in the Ivory version and by Mark Williams in a much more restrained way here, are gay. Blink and you may well miss the inference and may wonder exactly what Mr Beebe is referring to when later he says that Cecil is not the marrying kind. It is, of course, only one reading into the behaviour of both these characters but it certainly goes some way to explaining the character of Beebe, if not always Cecil. And it ensures that this adaptation is not simply a slavish copy of the James Ivory version.
Did I prefer it to Ivory's version? Well, not exactly but it held me in its velvet glove of a grip right to the end and finally it moved in a really quite unexpected fashion.