In this way, and due in no small part to the outstanding performances of the actors, we are very quickly apprised of the personalities of the major characters, and soon we are eager to find out what will develop in their lives. All the essential elements are included, both characters and incidents, and Eliot's own (quite modern) structure is adhered to at the same time, the film skillfully compresses large stretches of the novel by allowing a single, well-chosen scene or series of images to carry the narrative weight of several similar scenes in the novel.
And soon Daniel becomes involved with another woman, this time on the other end of the social scale, when he rescues a destitute Mirah Lapidoth (Jodhi May) and is drawn into her world as well.ĭaniel Deronda is certainly one of the best novel-to-film adaptations that I've seen. As the film opens, Daniel observes and is fascinated by a beautiful young woman, Gwendolyn Harcourt (Romola Garai), whom we soon learn has a passionate and troubled history of her own. The title character, Daniel Deronda (Hugh Dancy), is a sensitive young man whose ready access to wealth and a life of leisure, thanks to his adoptive father Sir Hugo (Edward Fox), has not dulled his eagerness to experience the world and to understand other people. This is a film that is better than the original novel. In this respect the novel Daniel Deronda doesn't entirely succeed but what's more interesting is that as I was reading it, and noting both its successes and its failures, it occurred to me that the story might very well work better translated to the screen rather than the page. One of George Eliot's late works, Daniel Deronda balances on the cusp between Dickensian mid-Victorian melodrama and turn-of-the-century realism the massive novel features an intricate plot while also trying to reach a new psychological depth. In anticipation of reviewing the 2002 BBC production of Daniel Deronda, I made a point of reading my copy of the novel, which I'd been meaning to get around to for a while.
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