J. Sheridan LeFanu is what my acting teachers used to call "culturally bound". (Adam Sandler and Lindsay Lohan are culturally bound; Cate Blanchett and Gary Oldman o'er-leap caste, temporal and ethnic barriers with ease and grace.) Although very much products of their time and culture, there is something about a Bronte or an Austen novel that allows it to make the leap; not so the LeFanu. His heroines are too obsequious, too passive to please us; his villains are so particularly the sons and daughters of the opium habit that they seem, despite all their glorious evil, weirdly passive as well. Anyone who wends his way through the entirety of a LeFanu ("Carmilla", weighing in at a svelte 152 pages, doesn't count) realizes early on that it's probably not going to take him where he wants to go, or anywhere that a modern sensibility has come to expect. There's nothing for it but to relax the critical faculty and drift as far into his dream-state as possible.
Screen adaptations, then, are a perplexity of Gordian intricacy, and the Wyvern Mystery is a singular case. Directed for television in 2000 by Alex Pillai ("Wire in the Blood", "Touching Evil II"), it was obviously made with great care and with a genuine regard for the author, yet the story is entirely changed, and for good reason. The result is a beautiful lesson in the filming of an unfilmable novel.
Intact are the book's laudanum-soaked eeriness, its pastoral landscapes, its encroaching claustrophobia as our heroine is entangled in her slow-closing net. The book, however, loses its focus about halfway in, as if LeFanu has changed his mind about who exactly dunnit and what exactly was done. He jumps back and forth as fancy takes him from one character's head into another until he loses interest at last and abruptly leaves off. Screenwriter David Pirie ("Poirot", "Murder Rooms") takes the threads unspooled in the first half and spins from them a surprisingly stalwart tapestry, plumping characters up from two dimensions into three, from Dickensian blacks and whites across a subtle palette of moral greys. A fellow who looks like a straightforward black-hat in the first minutes may not be by the end and the same, sinisterly, is true amongst the white-hats. Pirie has taken the most daunting obstacle in his path, our heroine's naive credulousness, and shaped it into a lens through which we very slowly see the world around her move into terrible focus as she passes from innocence into adulthood. And because it's Naomi Watts playing the role, throwing herself into the melodrama with laudatory whole-heartedness, the thing comes off smashingly.
I've seen the dramatization dismissed as muddled (the Videohound calls it "confused and stodgy"), but LeFanu must always be approached sideways rather than headlong. It's not a straight tale; it's an opiate nightmare, with dark passages that lead into dead ends and rooms glimpsed through smoky glass that never do come clear. This fellow Pirie has done wonders, pulling the dark velvet of the story across a solid frame, and in doing it he's managed to create at least one absolutely masterful character.
In the book, she is the dark and almost buffoonish Bertha Velderkaust, your fairly standard Madwoman-in-the-Attic. In the film, she becomes the formidable and chilling Vrau, her name spoken from the chest like a growl, and she is the monster from the id. Played brilliantly by Aisling O'Sullivan, Vrau is blind, insane, addicted to opium, disfigured with burn-scars and driven by lust for vengeance, a homocidal maniac. When she must wait, she waits patiently, stock still, a beast of prey; when she attacks, it is with terrifying ferocity. She is one of those rare characters who are both symbol and human and work flawlessly on both levels. The last time we see her she is sitting quietly, lost in thought and drenched with blood, as dignified and compelling in her silence as any Monte Cristo who has realized a vengeful dream only to find it hollow at the core.
LeFanu chose the marble and had the vision, leaving a tantalizing half-sculpture for this crack team of Brits to finish. The result is one damn fine evening of old-fashioned, blood-and-laudanum, virgins-in-nightdresses-running-down-dark-hallways, Gothic delerium.
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