The problem with any adaptation of a work about a specific historical time or story is that you need to satisfy two different audiences, and try to pull in a third: you must satisfy the history wonks -- in this case, the Arthurian buffs (the medievalists know better); you must satisfy the people who love the original work, whether it be book or play or whatever; you want to draw in the people who just want to watch an interesting television story. The path TNT took is one guaranteed to satisfy none of the above.

Previous productions may have shadowed TNT's version. Oddly, although there have been a few, only two could be said have endured, and those somewhat indifferently: the 34-year-old Camelot and the 20-year-old Excalibur. Camelot is a comparatively focused telling, as well as a musical; it revolves principally around the events that brought an end to the Round Table and Arthur's reign. Excalibur, for all that it is (quite frequently) high comedy, is more directly comparable in the sweep and scope of its story; it at least manages to incorporate most, if not all, of the major details that people generally consider part of the tale. TNT eschewed the glitz and glamour of both productions to go for a certain earthiness and attention to period detail. (Not too much attention, though; the fact that the people of that historical period were, quite literally, the great unwashed and the great undernourished is tactfully ignored.) Period sounding incidental music is provided by Lorena McKennitt. And, in perhaps too great an attempt to distance itself from Excalibur, there is not the least bit of anything humorous to be found within miles of that series. (Well ... nothing intentionally humorous, anyway.)

While working with an Arthurian adaptation relieves you of the duty of worrying overmuch about the history as such -- historical Arthur having not been proven to even have existed in the ways that the legend states, and some specific parts disproven -- you do have to worry about getting the gross outline of the story in a form recognizeable by the Arthurian story buffs. In telling an Arthurian story, you also crash into the problem of the women and the problem of Lancelot/Lancelet/Galahad. Regarding the women, the problem is that it's never clear from story to story just how many women there were, or what their roles were or what their relationships to each other were. Viviane and Niniane and Nimue/Nimhue can be one women or two or three; it's not at all unusual to have them conflated into one person. It's not clear if Lancelot and Galahad were one person, or if Galahad was Lancelot's son (althouth the latter is the usual tack).

Along with Ms. Bradley, TNT decides to keep the women as separate entities: Viviane (Anjelica Huston) as the Lady of the Lake; Morgaine (Julianna Margulies) as the daughter of Igraine (Caroline Goodall) and Gorlois of Cornwall, and Morgause (Joan Allen) as the sister of Viviane and Igraine. Niniane and Nimue are both separate and nonentities who appear briefly on screen then are gone.

Generally speaking, I don't have any quarrel with the acting. I'd thought, when I heard of the casting, that someone had made a grievous mistake by putting Julianna Margulies in that story, but she does, in fact, acquit herself reasonably well. Her accent is consistent, although not quite convincing. She's lumbered with some truly dreadful narration (I don't think a single word of it comes from the book) and some truly dreadful lines -- if you don't believe me, just look at the first line of this piece again. What sane person has ever spoken like that? Written, yes; spoken, no. Joan Allen is as deliciously evil as Morgause as one could want -- although it's a reading more out of the tale than the book; she's not exactly nice in the book, but she's not quite that barbed, either. (That aside, Joan Allen is the one person who looks truly as if her costumes were made for her; she's the only one who really looks right in them.) And, as many a critic has said, Viviane is the type of role for which Anjelica Huston was born. The men are all right; as in the book, they've got somewhat of a secondary role, because the viewpoint characters are all the women. They're mostly just too young to convincingly carry the latter parts of the story -- for example, in their great confrontation scene where Mordred tells Arthur who he is, they seem to be roughly the same age; they either didn't or couldn't age Edward Atherton (Arthur) convincingly (the beard and ill-fitting wig just don't do it).

The changes made by TNT, to both generally accepted canon and the book, for this version are utterly baffling. The very very very broad outlines of the book are retained -- it's still generally the women's story, rather than Arthur's or Lancelot's -- but within those outlines they take extraordinary liberties with both. For example, in the book, rather than cruelly tearing Morgaine and Arthur from Uther's court, Viviane convinces Uther that it's for the best; he has no difficulty sending Arthur away, for nobody believes that Arthur is his, due to the deception involved in his conception, and she persuades him to send Morgaine to Avalon for her sanity. It would not have been difficult for TNT to keep that scene intact, and they tossed it for no apparent reason, except to make Viviane seem more cruel. In both the book and generally in the tale itself, Arthur and Morgaine know at the time (or rather, just after) that they've slept together; in the tale, it's generally because Morgaine/Morgan/Morgause throws it back in his face, and in the book, they talk after the making the Great Marriage and stumble across shared memories.

One scene remains almost perfectly intact from the book; oddly, it's the one scene that I'd have sworn that they would cut. Given the way that the book was reshaped, it made no intrinsic sense to keep it. The scene where Gwenhwyfar and Lancelot and Arthur collectively make love (and we get a lovely shot of Samantha Mathis' bare bottom and backside which I suppose is meant to show her vulnerability but which comes off as entirely gratuitous) is not only included but is pulled nearly word-for-word from Mists. I must admit, the actors brought to it an interpretation that I hadn't expected. In the book, it seems both slightly awkward, but something that they all desire; in TNT's version, both Gwenhwyfar and Lancelot must nearly be ordered by Arthur to do what they all desire, and, as it might be in life, the situation is positively excruciating. (Actually, while Edward Atherton does a good job with the rest of the scene, he utterly misses the embarrassment and humiliation that a young king should feel at voicing the thought that he's infertile -- then again, Arthur is drunk, so maybe numbness is appropriate.) Not surprisingly, the love of Arthur and Lancelot -- no no no, not quite that kind of love -- is muted throughout the miniseries nearly to the point of invisibility, which robs the scene of much of the power it should have; they have so little time together that you never believe that they truly do love each other more than brothers. Immediately after, Lancelot proposes to the lady Elaine as a way of getting out of Arthur's castle, and away from both of the people he loves -- a scene displaced from considerably later in the book -- thus producing a fit from Gwenhwyfar at Elaine, and a scene of a queen's rather extraordinary revenge -- in the book, the same scene takes place, but the revenge is incidental; it's nothing that Gwenhwyfar actually planned or tried to carry out.

From that point on, TNT does quite extraordinary violence to the book and the tale -- literally extraordinary violence, as it turns out. Morgaine is injured in an attack by Saxons that never occurs in either tale or book (and does a rather nifty trick with her horse that cavalrymen everywhere would give their eyeteeth to get their horses to do), and this is principally in service of getting her to the convent at Glastonbury for a wondrous scene of immediate reconciliation with her mother (Igraine actually died quite a bit earlier, and without ever seeing her daughter again), and a later meeting with Gwenhwyfar, after her infidelity with Lancelot is discovered. A startlingly youthful looking Morgause (well, it's some 40 years since we first saw her as an adult, and she looks scarcely a day older, despite attempts to bury her under layers of excitingly Pictish makeup) and an equally startlingly youthful Viviane die in a grand guignol murder scene on Camelot's steps that's utterly ridiculous. Igraine, who in almost every version is usually the second character to die (well, she is Arthur's mother, for heaven's sake), outlives every major character but Morgaine (and has a lovely screaming scene in a fog-shrouded Stonehenge when Viviane and Morgause die).

Alteration upon alteration, and none of them make the least sense. For some reason, despite the fact that much of the point of the Arthurian tale is in the raising of Camelot as a symbol of his reign's prosperity and security, the raising is entirely omitted (it could have been elided without difficulty); Camelot is somehow Uther's castle which Arthur inherits, and Caerleon is never mentioned. (FYI, archaeologists have, in fact, found historical Caerleon.) The story of the Grail is never once introduced. The archetype of Gwenhwyfar as the Much Abducted Damsel never appears -- I will admit to being rather thankful about that, as the one abduction in the book is fairly brutal (Bradley dropped a couple of abductions off, and upped the violence in the one that remained). Galahad never appears, either as an alternate name for Lancelot or as his son, but then, if you have no grail, you don't need Galahad. In most versions of the tale, and in the book, either Lancelot or Percival survives the final battle between Mordred and Arthur to throw the sword back into the lake; in this version, there's no Percival -- that entire generation, with the exception of Mordred and Gawain, doesn't exist in this version -- and Lancelot does not survive. As for the disposition of Excalibur itself ... well, the lake's involved, anyway -- as is the Lady of the Lake, come to think of it, although that's just a bit of a reach. That's about all I can say for it.

For all the pointless changes, TNT did display a certain chutzpah, both in producing a version they had to know will satisfy none of the program's natural audiences, and for appending an ending that is certain to infuriate conservatives everywhere. (The fact that they would almost certainly never watch such a series having nothing at all to do with expressing indignation, of course.) The ending draws a direct -- and generally historically quite accurate -- connection between the Goddess and the Virgin Mary certain to aggravate many; I would imagine TNT's phone lines are raging even now. Then again, the end of the book draws a direct connection between Saint Brighid and Ireland's Lady Goddess, so at least the miniseries ends in the proper spirit, if nothing else.

In an understandable, if peculiar, programming decision, TNT screened Excalibur directly after part 1 of the Mists miniseries. (Featuring, in the role of Guenevere's father, a younger and surprisingly beefy Patrick Stewart.) You could see all the places where TNT probably got it right historically ... but Excalibur had the right feel to it. Even allowing for the fact that it was, in many places, a rollicking comedy, even allowing for the shiny chrome armor (which didn't historically appear for something like 400 years after the theorized time of possibly historical Arthur) and all the other anachronisms and loophones, Excalibur is somehow a more satisfying visual telling of the story.

Overall, if you want to see a good adaptation of The Mists of Avalon ... this is not that story. If you want to see a story of Arthur similar to the tale you know ... again, this is not that story. If you want to see an interesting, generally well-acted television program, with the caveat that the writing is generally only average (and in places quite abominable), then it's not a hideously awful way to spend four hours. But you could do better.

Frankly, I'd rather spend it re-reading the book.

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The Mists of Avalon
TNT
4 hours, miniseries
originally broadcast July 15 and 16
to be rebroadcast in its entirety on Friday, July 20, 7pm Central

 

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