Review: Middlemarch

Lastly in The George Eliot Collection, my mom and I watched Middlemarch (I will have reviewed all the movies in The George Eliot Collection except for one, Silas Marner). I never heard about it until I started watching period dramas.

Box art

Synopsis
There are two main storylines to Middlemarch. The first one is about a woman, Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey), who marries the middle-aged Casaubon. She wishes to help him with his research, but he gets irriated when she tries to help him. She meets Casaubon's young cousin, Will Ladislaw, and the two quickly become close. The second is about a doctor named Tertius Lydgate, who comes to Middlemarch. He soon afterwards, marries the beautiful Rosamond Vincy and then deals with financial problems.

Characters
Fans of Colin Firth (Pride and Prejudice) might be interested to know that his brother, Jonathan Firth, was in this movie. Other than that, there weren't any actors or actresses that I recognized.

I had a really hard time telling the characters apart for a good majority of the movie. Most of the men looked too much alike. This made it difficult to follow certain parts of the story. They should have dressed them differently from each other or give the characters different hair colors, something to tell them apart. It's wasier to tell woman characters apart, since they all wear their hair differently and dress differently. With the men, it was difficult, indeed!

Casaubon, Dorothea, and Landislaw.

Since the plot is divided into two storylines, it would be inevitable to compare them with each other. The whole storyline with Dorothea was a bit uninteresting: Spoilers she marries an older man hoping to help him on his research, but he doesn't want her to help him, she starts to love his cousin (who looked shifty, if you ask me), and then her husband dies and his will prevents her from marrying his cousin. End of Spoilers There really wasn't anything very interesting going on in that plot. It was all a bit dull.

The Lydgate story fared a little bit better than the Dorothea story. It was a little bit more interesting, but even throughout most of that story, it was one bad thing happening after another. If you're looking for something to cheer you up, this isn't the right storyline for you...

Scenery
Kind of disappointing. Usually for BBC miniseries, there is such lovely scenery and bright, beautiful colors. I don't know if they used an inferior camera or the technology wasn't great, but the colors did not look that good. There was also a brief screen or two towards the end where the picture was very poor, but after a few shots, it went back to normal. Scenes took place in Middlemarch and a couple in Rome, both inside and outside.

Costuming

Rosamond and Lydgate on their wedding day.

Nothing really spactacular as far as costuming was in this miniseries. Since Dorothea has a plain personality, she was dressed in very plain clothing. I will say that Rosamond had very pretty dresses; her dresses had a very nice color on them and they were in very pretty styles. Her dresses were probably the best throughout the entire miniseries.

Like I said before, they should have varied the men's costumes, since it was difficult to tell them apart.

Overall: 1/5
Not very good. The whole miniseries was dull, uninteresting, and hard to follow. I didn't like it very much. There was one adult scene, but it didn't last too long. It was hard to pay attention what was going on throughout the miniseries. I probably wouldn't watch it again. I know there are a lot of people who love this miniseries, but I did not like it. Although, Rosamond's costumes were very nice: if you are looking for costume ideas, you might want to take a look at her dresses.

Middlemarch is available on DVD through The George Eliot Collection or you can purchase it on it's own. It runs for 375 minutes. It has six episodes with varying lengths.