Screenplay by Louis Marx and Giles Foster
Directed by Giles Foster
A B. B.C. Film
Compared to Protestants, cradle Catholics must seem nostalgic, fatalistic, complacent. Saved at infancy, they can spend the rest of their lives merely consolidating. Since consolidation isn’t dramatic, no wonder Catholic novelists and playwrights exert their ingenuity devising ever new ways to damn their heroes. Whenever you encounter an evil genius in a Graham Greene thriller or a pernicious fool in an Heinrich Boll satire, rest assured, that monster was born a Catholic and will die cursing the God in Whom he still believes.
But Protestantism, especially of the evangelical kind, is the religion of mid-life crisis. The sinner surveys his or her past and repents of what he sees. Baptism sets him on a new path. And, once in progress, he must never look back lest he turn back. Perhaps the quintessentially Protestant moment in the Old Testament is the story of Lot, and what happened to Lot’s wife is the quintessentially Protestant warning: don’t look back.
Watching the film version of Silas Marner, which aired on PBS stations this spring, I was struck by how deeply Protestant the George Eliot story is (though Eliot had shed the evangelism of her youth by the time she wrote it). And I was also struck by the fact that the filmmakers, though wonderfully faithful to the book in all other respects, had deleted the Protestant note of warning which Eliot strikes near the end of her tale, making an already cozy story a trifle cozier than the author intended it to be, and somewhat vitiating her drama. But first, let’s praise their faithfulness to Eliot’s story and to her method of telling the story.
The plot has the symmetry and rhyming actions of a fairy tale, and indeed Eliot called her novel “a sort of legendary tale.” But in legends sheer pattern often takes precedence over emotion. Not so in Silas Marner, in which symmetry is finally upset by emotion and free will. The yarn turns out to be more than a yarn; it’s a testament to the human capacity for moral growth.
A simple, pious man subject to catatonic spells, Silas is framed on a charge of robbery during one of his lapses. Having lost his reputation, his fiancée, and his faith in God, Marner leaves his home in northern England to settle in the south as a weaver. Hoarded money fills the void in his heart but the treasure is stolen by the local squire’s younger son. The elder son’s clandestine wife comes to the village but dies in the snow; her infant daughter toddles into the weaver’s cottage while he is suffering another attack of catatonia. Seeing the blonde hair of the girl crouched beside his fireplace, the weaver momentarily hallucinates that his gold has been restored. Then he clutches the child to him in an excess of love that lasts the rest of his life. Years pass. The girl’s father, happily remarried but childless, comes to claim his daughter just at the moment that Marner’s gold has been restored to him through a freak accident. At this point, the fairy-tale symmetry should reexert itself: since the gold has come back to Silas, the child should go back to its real father. But human emotions aren’t as portable as moneyboxes. We take leave of Silas no longer troubled by catatonia but only dazed by his good fortune, the goodwill of men, and the love of God for His creatures.
Silas Marner is the great concentrate of Victorian novels. The social discernments, loving descriptions of buildings and weather, comic detours, melodramatic twists, and full-scale characterizations which Dickens, Trollope, and Eliot herself would usually take eight hundred pages to negotiate, are all here in Marner, but neatly packed into something under two hundred pages. It is a miraculous union of forward motion with density of detail. One can read the book in a couple of sittings, but later it slowly expands in the mind.
The adaptors, Louis Marx and Giles Foster, preserve both the speed and the density of the novel. Now, speed is never a problem for competent film directors. They can always whizz a story along with gliding camera work, shock cuts, or what have you. But Foster and Marx have done something far more effective than that. They have invented images which not only tell Eliot’s story quickly but which can carry more than one meaning. In the scene in which Silas’s congregation draws lots to determine his innocence or guilt, Eliot is rather vague about how such a transaction proceeds. But Foster has the lots placed on a table in such a way that they look like coins stacked for counting. Thus, these coin-like objects not only declare a man guilty but also suggest the coins that Marner will one day hoard and caress as a substitute for human sympathy.
When the adverse judgment is made on Silas, Eliot simply writes “. . . every one rose to depart.” But Foster stages the moment so that everyone rises and turns around. Silas is left standing in the center aisle of the church, seeing on all sides the backs of his erstwhile friends and fellow worshipers. His sweetheart is in the loft just above him. When he looks up pleadingly at her, she turns away, so that Silas is shown gazing upward at nothing.
Cut to Silas leaving his town in haste. Foster photographs him moving from left to right. This is standard cinematic practice whenever a director wants to show decisive forward motion. There is, in fact, a whole series of very quick shots of Marner moving in this direction. But suddenly here is a shot of him standing and stretching his arm to the left towards a waterfall in order to fill his jug, while water and wind race in the opposite direction. It’s as if Marner had set the tilt of his whole being against nature after men had turned their backs on him, and after heaven had refused his plea. All this is communicated in a few fast visual strokes. Density at a fast tempo. Just as in Eliot.
Ben Kingsley (who played the lead in Gandhi) plays Silas Marner. He lets us see the whole trajectory of the man’s life, beginning in untested certitude and ending on a plateau of quiet, almost weary joy. Kingsley limns each phase with unforgettable gestures and sounds. Only two instances among many: when miser Marner pours his gold pieces from one hand to another, Kingsley allows two short, sheep-like bleats to escape his lips, then convulsively shudders and presses his hands against his face. Those bleats capture perfectly the stupidity of greed; that shudder expresses an intelligent man’s knowledge of his own stupidity. Much later, old Marner sits in his doorway while Eppie, his adopted child, cuts his long, lank hair. Kingsley’s face is refulgent yet contained; it does not spill a drop of happiness.
Yet those who have read the book will know that Kingsley was denied a chance to make Marner a little less passive than he appears in the film. For in Eliot’s penultimate chapter she has the weaver deciding to visit the northern town from which he was driven. In seeking out the place of his youthful happiness and torment, Silas is uncharacteristically exerting his will and is even committing a mild act of hubris. It may seem odd to call it that, since Silas isn’t planning vengeance, but is only curious as to whether he was ever cleared of criminal charges or not. Even his pious confidante, Dolly Winthrop, urges him to take the trip as an easement of his mind. But I believe that the result of Silas’s return fulfills the Protestant dramatic pattern of the story and strikes the true evangelical warning note: don’t look back. For Silas finds that his little town has been completely obliterated by the onset of the Industrial Revolution: what was once a neighborhood is now a factory complex.
In seeking out his past, Silas has I discovered that, in a sense, he has no past, or at least no means of clarifying it. He has no choice now but to continue forward without looking back. It’s as if God had lovingly but firmly taken him by the shoulders and faced him in the right direction. It’s a slightly astringent note, and this already superior film adaptation would have been all the better for retaining it.
Strange to say, there is an American Silas Marner. I don’t mean an adaptation but a film dealing with the same themes within a strikingly similar dramatic pattern. This is the Horton Foote/Bruce Beresford film Tender Mercies, starring Robert Duvall. Its has-been country singer protagonist, Mac Sledge (author of such ballads as “God Can Forgive Me, Why Can’t You?”), turns his back upon a life of drunken folly by finding a place for himself in a new community. Just as Silas’s redemption is begun by a child who wanders into his house, Mac’s spiritual rescue is also the result of serendipity: his drunken collapse at a motel run by the firm and loving (and Baptist) woman who will come to wed him. Sheer serendipity? Or tender, divine rescue? Mac is silent when his wife insists it’s the latter, but he sets himself on the new path she has shown him and refuses to look back.
The temptation to do so comes in two forms: when Mac records his new songs with a young group (only to give the novices a good start) the songs enjoy a surprising success and Mac gets a firm offer from a former agent. But he refuses to claim his old coast-to-coast celebrity, settling for local fame because it befits his new life. Audiences may find this resolve charming, but the way Mac resists his second temptation may give them pause.
For the second temptation is his own daughter by his first marriage. Actually, Mac is receptive, even loving (in his taciturn way) toward the girl when she comes to visit the father she hasn’t seen since her childhood. He makes it clear that his home is always open to her. But when she asks him to sing her a song that he once used as a lullaby, he claims he’s forgotten it. This is a lie. When she leaves, he immediately sings the song to himself. Mac is willing to be a father to his daughter, but he will not be the man he once was even to the extent of singing an old lullaby. After all, that man who sang the lullaby twelve years ago also used to beat up his first wife, squander his earnings, and get blind on rotgut. To have his love the girl would have to honor his new spartan, Baptist existence. Instead, she runs off with a thrice-divorced lush, a back-up musician fifteen years older than she. Mac regrets, but he isn’t looking back.
And so, given Mac’s total commitment to a new life, Tender Mercies should end on an even happier note than that which closes Silas Marner, which, after all, had a somewhat backward-looking hero. But it doesn’t.
Mac’s daughter is killed when her new husband drunkenly smashes their car. The husband doesn’t suffer a scratch; the girl’s body is so badly mangled that her casket will have to be kept closed at the funeral. Mac’s agent telephones him the news and Mac passes it on to his wife: “My daughter was just killed in a car accident in northern Louisiana.” Pause. “I didn’t catch the name of the town.” Silas Marner lost the city of his youth. Mac Sledge has lost his flesh and blood.
Both Silas Marner and Tender Mercies end in gardens.
Eppie had a larger garden than she had ever expected. . . The garden was fenced with stones on two sides, but in front there was an open fence, through which the flowers shone with answering gladness, as the four united people [Silas, Eppie, Eppie’s new husband, and Mrs. Winthrop] came within sight of them.
“O father,” said Eppie, “what a pretty home it is! I think nobody could be happier than we are.”
In Tender Mercies, Mac, raking his garden, looks up at his wife only to run off a list of the wonderful and horrible things that have happened to him in his life. It’s as if God were keeping a balance sheet on Mac and adding a catastrophe or two every time the happiness side of the sheet got a little too full. “I never did trust happiness. Never have. Never will.” The entire scene is done in one static shot, the camera far back, Mac a shadow against the sky. Only if we listen very closely can we hear that Mac is weeping as he speaks.
Tender Mercies closes with Mac happily tossing a football to his little stepson. And Mac’s wife gazes from behind a screen door at the two people she most loves on earth.
Like George Eliot, Horton Foote affirms the tender mercy of God’s love and the power of human love as a conduit of divine charity. But, unlike Eliot (at least the Eliot of Silas Marner), Foote also affirms the unending menace of being alive in this world. God may love us but God’s earth doesn’t. Not looking back doesn’t stop lightning from striking on the path ahead.