Owen-TV: 'Little Dorrit' a Dickens tale with timely themes

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As PBS's "Masterpiece Classic" continues to roll out films based on the works of Charles Dickens, attention turns to one of the author's less popular works, "Little Dorrit." Beginning at 9 p.m. EDT Sunday and continuing for the next four Sundays, "Dorrit" tells a Dickens love story with the timely themes of chronic debt and financial collapse.
Amy "Little" Dorrit (Claire Foy) cares for her father (Tom Courtenay), who is confined to a debtor's prison, but she lands a job working for the imperious Mrs. Clennam (Judy Paritt). Her son, Arthur (Matthew Macfadyen), returns home after many years away, and a new mystery begins to unfold. He suspects his mother's uncharacteristic charity toward Amy may play a role in secrets his mother holds close.
The themes of Dickens' novel have obvious resonance during the current worldwide financial crisis with its examples of Bernard Madoff-like swindling.
"There is a character in 'Little Dorrit,' a very distinguished man. He runs an investment bank of his own, an investment bank that's so exclusive that people beg and plead to be allowed to invest their money in it," screenwriter Andrew Davies, a "Masterpiece" costume-drama veteran ("Bleak House," "Pride and Prejudice"), noted at a January PBS press conference.
"It's so grand and he returns such constant and high rate of interest on the investments. ... You know, it might remind you of something."
"Little Dorrit" itself may not be familiar. Unlike "Oliver Twist" or "David Copperfield," there haven't been many attempts in the past to commit the story to film. Davies said the fact that "Dorrit" is an unknown quantity was part of the appeal.
"It is one of those books that is enormously admired by literary people, academics, other writers," he said. "It just kind of never made it onto the popular front. Now it's there."
For some observers, the similarities between Dickens' serials and today's prime-time TV dramas are notable. But actor Timothy Spall, who played Fagin in last month's "Masterpiece" premiere of a new version of "Oliver Twist," rejected the notion that if Dickens were alive today he'd be writing TV soap operas.
"The only thing he has in common with soap operas is he wrote episodically," Spall said. "He's not a purveyor of tautological trash. He's actually a genius."
Of course, a few of TV's brighter, better-known scribes -- David Chase ("The Sopranos"), Joss Whedon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing") -- probably fit that canonization, too. But what may make Dickens stand above even the best of today's TV scribes is the way his stories have maintained their relevance.
Spall said one of Dickens' main themes was the destructive power of money and its ability to abuse the most needy of society.
"He is a person who, before there was a kind of conscience about social welfare, (advocated the notion) that society needs to take care of people rather than let them rot in their own ineptitude," Spall said. "That's why it will always be relevant, because he plugs mainly and massively into the human condition from birth to death."

(E-mail Rob Owen at rowen(at)post-gazette.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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