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Not-So-Great Train Robbery, Via Trollope
The New York Daily News
2 April 2002
By David Bianculli
Masterpiece Theatre: The Way We Live Now. 2 1/2 stars
In scope and in source material, the newest PBS Masterpiece Theatre offering—an adaptation of Anthony Trollope's sprawling novel The Way We Live Now that runs Monday nights at 9 (WNET/Ch. 13) after last night's debut—matches the most memorable achievements in that umbrella series' splendid history.
In execution and excellence, it does not.
The Way We Live Now shines, thanks to a few stunning performances and one or two artfully mounted scenes.
Yet regardless of how much momentum certain sequences attain, something else is always coming around the bend to slow down—even threatening to derail—the entire drama.
Andrew Davies' screenplay is true to Trollope's tale of Victorian-era greed, cunning and duplicity as complex and patiently unfurled as Mark Twain's similarly ambitious The Gilded Age, another story about fortunes tied to 19th-century railroad speculation.
Davies also is true to the characters, allowing their deeds, and especially their words, to carry them from one fortune or scandal to another.
Director David Yates makes the people, rather than the settings, most prominent. Even as a cautionary tale of an unbridled quest for wealth, The Way We Live Now is not as sumptuous visually as, say, The Jewel in the Crown.
But what The Way We Live Now has, and what elevates it whenever he appears, is David Suchet as the story's central villain, financier Augustus Melmotte.
The way we live now—in the age of Enron and media barons, of megamergers and dot-com crashes—makes Melmotte as identifiable and captivating a figure as ever. Suchet, who in previous imported PBS offerings was all stiff poise as Hercule Poirot and repressed analyst as Sigmund Freud, really lets his hair down as Melmotte.
Down, and out, and in every direction. His eyebrows are like characters of their own—the least-tamed on PBS, perhaps, since Leo McKern in Rumpole of the Bailey—and his hair isn't far behind. Suchet's performance is equally wild: whispery when you expect sparks, fiery when you expect otherwise.
He's great, clearly relishing such a full and tasty role, but his co-stars don't often match him. If not for the playful score by Nicholas Hooper, there would be much less humor and drama in The Way We Live Now. Cheryl Campbell as Lady Carbury, Tom Fahy as the butler, Jim Carter as Mr. Brehgert and Matthew Macfadyen as Sir Felix Cadbury keep up with Suchet's contributions, but they're among the few who do.
The worst offender, perhaps, is Miranda Otto as the widow Hurtle, an American woman whose betrayal and revenge are central to the story—but who, as portrayed by Otto, sports a Southern accent so unconvincing and distracting that some of the best scenes in the drama are robbed of all impact.
But that's the moral of The Way We Live Now: Fame and fortune rise, and fall, on the smallest of things. Neither Melmotte, nor the gifted actor who portrays him, can control his surroundings.
