Mourning becomes them
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- April
- 17
Last Sunday’s PBS adaptation of “A Room With A View” reversed the typical movie treatment of a literary work.
Usually, films romanticize novels, as in the superb 2006 version of “A Painted Veil,” which is far more forgiving than W. Somerset Maugham’s equally haunting novel.
But Andrew Davies — just call him “Mr. Adaptation” — gave E.M. Forster’s “Room” an unhappy ending, which rendered the story of an impressionable young woman who chooses love over money all the more poignant. Still, it had nothing to do with Forster’s book.
Mourning, however, becomes PBS this month. At 9 p.m. Sunday on WNET-Channel 13 locally, “Masterpiece” presents “My Boy Jack,” about author Rudyard Kipling’s 17-year-old son, a soldier who wound up missing in action in World War I. David Haig, who adapted the screenplay from his own stage work, is the gung-ho Kipling, with Kim Cattrall as his independent-minded, American-born wife, Carrie, and David Radcliffe as their son.
It’s a tribute to Cattrall’s and Radcliffe’s performances that you never once think of “Sex and the City” or Harry Potter (or for that matter, Radcliffe in “Equus,” coming to Broadway this fall). “My Boy Jack,” however, is really about Kipling, yet another middle-aged man sending a young one off to war.
Every historical war is seen through the prism of the current or most recent one. And so Iraq informs Kipling’s Great War, particularly in the scenes between the author and his wife, which are no doubt similar to those being played out in homes across America. These moments crackle with the almost unbearable pain and honesty of parents who must cycle through grief, regret and recrimination to acceptance.
Tonight at 8, PBS’ “Great Performances” presents “Primo,” with Anthony Sher as Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it. It is, of course, a stark story, told with stark effectiveness through Sher’s adaptation and performance of Levi’s “Survival at Auschwitz,” the jangling music and the spare set on London’s Hampstead Theater, an abstraction of the death camp.
Primo Levi died at age 67 on April 11, 1987 after a fall from an interior landing in his apartment building in Turin, an apparent suicide. There may not have been anything apparent about it. As some writers have asked, Why would a chemist take his own life by throwing himself down a flight of stairs? It makes no sense, though suicide is not necessarily a rational act, and anyway, there is a part of each of us that remains a mystery.
Holocaust witness Elie Wiesel may have put it best when he said “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years earlier.”
“Primo” is hard to watch, but then you ask yourself, How much harder was it to live?
This entry was posted
on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 5:00 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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