The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)

Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan, Charlotte Mitchell, Lynsey Baxter, Peter Vaughan, Colin Jeavons, Liz Smith, Patience Collier, Leo McKern. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by John Fowles. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Carl Davis. 

When I used to teach a course on Victorian literature, I would assign, in addition to Dickens and George Eliot and the Brontës, John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman because, more than any other critical work I know of, it illuminated what those 19th-century novelists were up to: what they were telling us that their contemporary readers knew firsthand about the manners and morals and sexuality of their times. And about the intellectual controversies, such as Darwinism and societal change, that raged in the times. And crucially, about the conventions and evasions of fiction itself. Not much of this is readily translatable into cinematic terms, so when Karel Reisz came to film the novel and Harold Pinter to write the screenplay for it, much of that, especially the metafictional aspect of Fowles's book, had to be jettisoned. Instead, Reisz and Pinter chose to tell the main story of the novel -- the love affair of Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) and Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) -- within the framework of a story about the actors, Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons), also having a affair while performing in a movie about Sarah and Charles. The result, for anyone who relished the novel, was bound to be disappointing, even with actors as skilled as the film's stars. The movie is splendidly mounted and photographed, the music score is ravishing, and the performances are subtle and witty. But the frame seems gratuitous. Fowles's novel famously had alternate endings for its story about Sarah and Charles: one conventionally tidy in the manner of Victorian fiction, the other enigmatic in the manner of modern novels. The film instead assigns the Victorian ending to Sarah and Charles, the modern one to Anna and Mike, which only approximates the point Fowles was trying to make about fictional conventions. Streep got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and it's her usual carefully detailed work. To some it's a little too detailed and self conscious, and it doesn't quite match with Irons's performance: He admitted that, as a stage-trained actor making his first major film, he was puzzled by what Streep was doing until he realized that she knew much more about acting for the camera than he did. It's possible that if you haven't read the book, you're at an advantage, but as one who admires the original, I find this version pretty but flat.