Fan site for the BBC miniseries North & South, starring Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe. Review of the BBC miniseries.
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Danusha Goska, a most articulate member of the C19 message board, composed an eloquent assessment as to why the North & South BBC adaptation rates a 10 out of 10. Read more of Danusha's writings on her site.
Top Twelve Reasons "North and South" is a Ten:
PRODUCTION VALUES: Historic looms weave again. Lemon-yellow sunlight floods a garden's translucent petals and leaves. Made me cry. Gave me chills.
MARTIN PHIPPS' HYPNOTIC SCORE: reminiscent of Gorecki; minimalism that drills past the kapital-K-krap of the last hundred years of pop culture and reaches something as fundamental as the beat of a human heart, the lungs' breath. Honors both one of the most wrenchingly intimate onscreen moments ever and yet also the sweep of the Industrial Revolution.
SINEAD CUSACK: breathtaking as a ruthless matriarch; better, even than Nancy Marchand as a Mafia queen in "The Sopranos."
POSTURE: Never has so much drama been milked out of actors' vertebrae. Helen Hayes' czarina pose in "Anastasia" was good, but Sinead Cusack's carriage and Richard Armitage's spinal column earn special Academy Awards.
PLOT TWISTS: I did not know where this one was going until the very last moment of the very last scene. Twists pulled me into the issues the plot engages, and made me engage them myself.
IT'S COMPLICATED: Leftist academics' pinko-tinged glasses depict the workers as beautiful and bosses as diabolical. But tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who brutalized his workers, was an epic philanthropist; workers scabbed, drank, and beat their kids. N&S depicts historical complications with its heroic/brutal workers/bosses. All characters are sometimes sympathetic, and sometimes utterly alienating - just like real life! A complex script works to earn our understanding, and our love, for complex human beings, the service, art, at its best, performs.
CHICK FLICK: "Fight, flight, or fix it" is a male response. Guy flix: explosions, chases, gadgets. "Tend and befriend" is a female response. We restore the world by ministering to its root: human hearts. N&S presents its heroine and its viewer with misunderstandings she must address; doing so, she matures, and we mature with her. Margaret's blossoming is an integral cog in a shock striking the world even today: the journey from tradition and pastoral beauty to sharp-elbow competition and industrial ugliness. Margaret's flailing culture shock and attempts to find, remain, and cultivate her best self under a rulebook she hasn't yet seen mirrors millions' struggle. Daniela Denby-Ashe limn's Margaret's triumph with honesty and grace. She's not afraid to be unlikeable; she's not even afraid to be noble.
MISOGYNY-FREE ZONE: We are so awash in misogyny, often fed by women themselves - who can forget the blow struck for women's dignity by celebrities who go out without their underthings? - that N&S is almost shocking in the respect it shows women. Margaret Hale has a front-row seat to one of the greatest upheavals in human history: industrialization. She takes on its rewards and woes. She makes decisions, engages with the powerful, grows and changes. And she does all this without once trivializing herself, or allowing anyone else to trivialize her. *And* she's accompanied by interesting women and girls, both rich and poor. That, alone, makes N&S worth more than a hundred critical darlings in which misogyny is an inescapable ingredient.
MORALITY. CHRISTIANITY. HOPE. REMEMBER THOSE? Gaskell's book and this adaptation take on really hard challenges: workers v. capitalists, traditional rural life's poverty and its beauty v. laissez-faire capitalism's new opportunities, ugliness and anomie. N&S could have just exploited the Industrial Revolution as colorful backdrop; it didn't. N&S attempts to offer solutions and hope, based on fundamental Christian values like non-violence and sharing. Gee, what if the folks who had made the nihilistic downer film "Syriana," about our dependence on petroleum, had tried something similar? When the N&S boss and his workers sat down to a meal together, I cried cynicism-free tears. But . . . what WERE they eating? It looked like sludge. The redemption in the movie's key kiss is not just about eros, it's also about agape. And that made me cry. (Cried many times.)
BRENDAN COYLE AS NICHOLAS HIGGINS: Let's import Higgins to the USA, making sure he keeps that snazzy, puffy-sleeved shirt that displays his chest hair. He'd be a greater boost to the trade union movement than locating Jimmy Hoffa.
NOT A SINGLE WASTED CHARACTER, PERFORMANCE, OR SCENE: A bereaved husband converses with his late wife, as a maid looks on, her facial expression speaking volumes. A desperate man gazes at running water dyed purple. The most amazing scene of all, every bit as stunning as the famous crane shot in GWTW: a woman, her straw hat and bumpkin gait rendering her an agrarian silhouette in an industrial landscape, drawn by a seductive, menacing, thrum, walks up to a large wooden door, pulls it back, and steps into the Industrial Revolution. "I have seen hell, and it is white, snow white." Mebbe so. But that scene is cinematic heaven-on-earth.
RICHARD ARMITAGE: I don't even want to go there. Let's just say that I've just purchased the latest ticket to his crowded harem of adoring fans, and this: even if I had watched N&S with the sound turned off; Armitage's performance was so exquisitely articulate I could have transcribed pages of dialogue and backstory just from studying his face. But if I watched with the sound turned off, I would have missed the most arresting screen voice since Orson Welles, and the dreamiest since Ronald Coleman . . . Ladies, cave. Resistance is futile.
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