this was a good scene: Thomas Cromwell showing off his old skills as a soldier to all the beardy dudes in floppy hats |
His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and late to bed.
Cromwell in the books is fluid, smart, mercurial, sexy, dangerous and vindictive. In Hans Holbein's painting he's bold, watchful, brassy and well fed. Rylance just isn't that guy I'm afraid.
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Claire Foy is good as Anne Boleyn and Bernard Hill as the Duke of Norfolk is profane, bold, vulgar, swaggering and brilliant. Anton Lesser, alas, is a big charisma suck as Thomas More and Damien Lewis's Henry isn't very sexy or dangerous either (he simpers, cries and prays way too much) and because of that much of the tension and real fear of the books just isn't there. And, as I've said, the rest of the supporting cast is bland and samey...
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The cinematography is a problem too. Wolf Hall has been shot in the same style the BBC has been doing forever. Establishing shot, close up, relentless scheme of shot/counter shot in the two handers. Wolf Hall could have been made thirty years ago: the camerawork is polite, uninventive, stationary, soft focused and dull. Futhermore the decision to film much of the interiors in what looks like natural light (or a simulated natural or candle light) is an interesting Kubrickian one, but it doesn't quite come off and the interior scenes are drearier than they need to be. And there are a lot of interior scenes. (Remember when they criticised The Phantom Menace for all its tedious scenes of people talking politics on uncomfortable chairs...well here there are endless scenes of people talking politics and God in dimly lit rooms on uncomfortable chairs.) I think if HBO had gotten the rights to this rather than the BBC they would have cast it better, lit it properly, had many more exteriors and filmed everything with more panache.
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But look this is just one person's opinion and I am clearly a voice crying in the wilderness. (I thought the BBC's Sherlock was bollocks so what do I know.) And I haven't read a single negative review of Wolf Hall anywhere. Watch it and you'll probably like it, and then you should watch the BBC adaptation of JK Rowling's A Casual Vacancy which will probably be right up your alley too. Me? I was disappointed. A great couple of books have been turned into safe, conformist, predictable, middle-class, rather mediocre television that'll play well for Anglophiles everywhere on the BBC, BBC America and PBS.