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TV review
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Costume drama
The Forsyte Saga returns
BY CLEA SIMON

Set in late Victorian London — with modernism threatening right around the corner — John Galsworthy’s familial three-part epic The Forsyte Saga provided a perceptive look back on an era not long past when it appeared, between 1906 and 1920. First adapted for television in 1969 as a 26-part series, it helped launch public broadcasting as we now know it, clearing ground for high-drama costume series like Upstairs, Downstairs and, indeed, for Masterpiece Theatre itself. In this new adaptation, the story’s ageless conflicts are set in high period relief, powered by a beautiful production that conjures an England long gone and a stellar cast who capture the roiling emotions beneath this high bourgeois family’s resplendent velvet, satin, and jewels.

Those emotions boil over right from the start. " We can at least have honesty and respect, " a husband tells his wife, explaining why he’s leaving her for their servant. " The master and a governess, " she responds scornfully, citing the scandal that will ensue. This is a scene of heartbreak and betrayal, perfect for the opening of a mini-series. But it’s also a face-off between changing eras that reveals the conflict between their mores: the one seeks modern communication, the other falls back on propriety.

What’s more, it’s a created scene; Galsworthy’s fat novel opens years later, with much of this series’s first two hours revealed through allusions to characters’ pasts and through memories. But it works as a piece with Galsworthy’s often humorous and perceptive text, laying the family’s complicated history out in a linear fashion that works best for this kind of drama in installments. One bad marriage splits, another falls into place, and the husbands, wives, children, and parents search for balance when affection and duty disagree. The answers they find keep changing; the younger Forsytes and their spouses are less likely to keep up appearances and accept their roles. " The Empire’s going to pot, and the family with it, " complains old James Forsyte (John Carlisle) as those complications play out. He’s speaking after the death of Victoria, but his sentiment has a modern ring: another paterfamilias disappointed in the choices of his offspring.

For the family as for the Empire, which enters the Boer War over the course of the eight-hour series, success and the assumption of the prerogatives of success have been stultifying. Having acquired, the Forsytes now wish only to maintain, to hold still, much as England did during the last years of Victoria’s reign. That the world and many of their peripheral family members are evolving makes misunderstandings inevitable.

Nowhere are these conflicts played out more visibly than on the face of Damian Lewis (from HBO’s Band of Brothers). Epitomizing the Forsyte dilemma as the young solicitor Soames Forsyte, Lewis’s creation is an uneasy balance of stubbornness and vulnerability. The pillar of the family (his own father defers to him on the question of his sister’s marriage settlement), Soames lives and breathes propriety. Insufferably stern to both his more emotionally labile brother and his unhappy wife, he’s a man almost out of time, his Victorian sense of entitlement already losing ground. As Soames’s family life grows more untenable, Lewis reveals the strain as frustration turns to rage. We can sympathize with his confusion — life is no longer going according to plan — but even as we are let into his dilemma, his anger seems repulsive.

We are, after all, products of our own age. And as he barks orders to his wife and brother, we too recoil, wishing that he would pause to enquire and listen. Still, his more modern wife, Irene Heron, is no contemporary paragon. Portraying the unhappy beauty, Gina McKee is a marvel of opacity. Her pale face and heavy-lidded eyes barely move as she lies still beneath her husband during sex. No wonder, then, that when her passions are ignited and she smiles at the object of her affection during a ballroom scene in which she seems to provide the only spark of color, everyone in the room is immediately aware of the change. Supported by a marvelous cast, including Colin Redgrave as Old Jolyon and Rupert Graves as Young Jolyon, two of the more sympathetic members of this clan, these talents fill those gorgeous costumes with flesh and blood. More important: with its vivid take on a distant, changing era, The Forsyte Saga is as relevant now as it was in 1969.

Issue Date: October 3 - 10, 2002
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