The Pale Horse
miniseries released 3/13/20
written by Sarah Phelps
starring Rufus Sewell, Sean Pertwee, and Kaya Scodelario
Since I've never read Agatha Christie's novel, I can't speak into the adaptation's accuracy. All I can speak into is whether I enjoyed it, and . . . I didn't.
Sarah Phelps just rubs me the wrong way with her cold, impersonal writing.
This is supposed to be Agatha Christie, but I already know that it probably isn't a faithful adaptation because it doesn't feel like Christie. It feels like Sarah Phelps and is the reason why I'm not calling it Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, other than in this sentence.
Why she doesn't just write her own stories is beyond me, but then that would be a challenge because she wouldn't be able to mooch off anyone else's ideas. Instead, she just steals from Agatha Christie, changing the entire tenor of the woman's writing style to something that just doesn't fit.
To give Rufus Sewell credit, he did what he could with the leading role.
He's an excellent actor that I've loved for quite a few years now and he never fails to disappoint. But what am I supposed to do with a leading man who's cheating on his second wife with a burlesque dancer? It made him very cheap and tawdry. Maybe he's that way in Ms. Christie's work, I don't know. I'm on hold for the ebook; we'll see how long that takes to come in for me. I'm supposed to care about Rufus Sewell's character (see, I can't even remember his name!). It's supposed to matter to me that his first wife was electrocuted in a bathtub. But I just was never fully engaged in the story enough to care.
Then you have his second wife, the marvelously talented Kaya Scodelario. I love her, but her character obviously has some sort of mood disorder, bouncing from normal to violent in the span of two seconds. Maybe it's Ms. Phelps's attempt at showing us the emotional oppression women were under in the 50s and 60s? They can't allow themselves to genuinely express what they're feeling and so they bottle it up until they explode? I don't know, but if that was the message, I couldn't really relate to it because it didn't fit the story.
Of course, Sean Pertwee is one of my absolute favorite actors, so it's always a delight when he pops up in a British miniseries now and then, even though I didn't enjoy The Pale Horse.
Here's the thing, though. If you're going to use Sean Pertwee then please give the man something to do! He was the police inspector and pretty much walked into scenes and out of them again with nothing resolved. That is a terrible use of his talent.
I just expect more. Don't give me cold, icy people speaking cold, icy dialogue in impersonal rooms.
Overall, The Pale Horse just bored me.
These are good actors, some of the best, really, and the script fell painfully flat. Pairing that script with the filming style of Leonora Lonsdale (whoever she is) was a mistake. There needed to be a livelier script and a director with a bit more life in their style to make the miniseries at all memorable.
As it is, I've watched it once and will never watch it again because I have no incentive to do so. The story isn't interesting, the filming style isn't interesting, and I'm pretty sure that Agatha Christie never wrote f**k in any of her books. That last bit is really just disrespectful of the originator of the story.
Despite my disappointment and boredom with Sarah Phelps' The Pale Horse, I am excited to read Agatha Christie's book.
I may just break down and buy it since it will take weeks for my library hold to come in. We'll see.
UPDATE: I've now read the novel, and you can read my thoughts in my blog post Classics Club: The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie (1961).
If you've watched The Pale Horse, what did you think?
Sarah Phelps did an awesome job with And Then There Were None (despite adding things) but... this was weird. And in fairness, it's a weird book. But this is nothing like it. He isn't married in the book -- the girl he's married to in this, is one of his neighbors. And I never finished reading it, because it was weird / boring, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't wind up a psychopath.
ReplyDeleteHis "wife" here had... bipolar disorder, I think?
First, it surprised me it was only two episodes. I thought, "That isn't enough time to flesh anyone out," and I was right. It was too cold / detached, and everyone had a mental disorder (she did well, foreshadowing his coldness in leaving a corpse to rot, running away, and lying about hitting a cat to his wife -- so that later he could kill someone, set them on fire, and walk away without a twinge of conscience). Plus, what was the ending? Is he dead? Dreaming again? Did the witches trap him in his head? Did any of that happen? Will the cop ever figure out who did it? Where's the last episode? :P
I think I just get tired of the weirdness in modern adaptations of most classic literature. It didn't used to be an issue but is rapidly becoming one. There's the charming oddity of adaptations like Nicholas Nickleby from 2002 that is undeniably quirky, but still accurate enough to be faithful to Dickens. And then there's adaptations like The Pale Horse that have me going "say what now?!"
DeleteI wish with all my heart that Sarah Phelps would start writing her own stories that aren't based off anything else. If she did that, then we'd probably love them! Because at least then it wouldn't have Agatha Christie's name in the title.
And yes, the ending of The Pale Horse was crazy. I didn't understand it, at all, but by that point, I didn't much care if he was alive or dead. Which is a sad thing to say because I'm now extremely fond of Rufus Sewell and I always want to root for him. It only took a decade, but better late than never!
My local used bookstore had a copy of the book for $3 so I bought it. We'll see what I think.
By weirdness, do you mean the writer not understanding the source material? I see a lot of that nowadays -- with Andrew Davies in particular not being 'deep' enough to adapt Tolstoy, for example -- but mostly I see writers wanting to change Christie's ending to surprise people or adding things to her. The last adaptation of The Pale Horse, they added Miss Marple so they had a proper detective.
DeleteThis honestly felt like... they forgot an episode.
Where Christie is concerned, it's the latter. In fact, it might be an absolute reversal from that first. Christie isn't that deep, really, and the newer films are trying to deepen her, which just doesn't work. She has a fun tone to her writing; a lot of her characters possess slightly snarky senses of humor. They weren't all depressed, morose, repressed souls wandering the streets of London in the dark, but that's what the modern adaptations add to the story, thinking we need something "more?" I think Agatha Christie is sufficient and entertaining just the way she is. Every time I finish a modern adaptation I immediately want to watch an episode of Suchet's Poirot. It doesn't matter which one, any will do.
DeleteIn fact, now that I'm done with my workday, I'll go turn on my Britbox and hunt down Poirot. :)