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cimoreneWarning: spoilers for The ABC Murders (2018). Refers to murder, body horror?, domestic abuse, forced prostitution, child abuse, Brexit, racism, xenophobia, and major character death.
You may be aware that I'm a passionate fan of Agatha Christie's Poirot, starring David Suchet: it's my most-rewatched media since adulthood and I have a Poirot screencap sideblog on Tumblr,![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
maisouipoirot. (I've read most of the books, some repeatedly, without loving them as much.) In general I'm interested in the differences between source texts and adaptations, as opposed to automatically preferring one or the other, so I'm not a biased Suchet fan determined to hate any other interpretation. I was intrigued by the recent John Malkovich ABC Murders and encouraged by the early stills and clips.
I did enjoy it, particularly Malkovich's performance. It wasn't the only great performance, but it was enough by itself to have redeemed even a significantly worse script than this one (say, one of the average quality of the recent ITV Marples, which tend to be about 30% crummy and encrusted in weirdly sensationalist tabloidesque elements like adding lesbians but only in places that will result in them being evil and/or dead). But fortunately for us all, this was a BBC production, not an ITV one (note that the latter Poirots were made for ITV, but they did mostly escape this type of treatment, with the exception of some extremely Mark Gatiss changes to some of the very late episodes).
The main thing I want to say about Malkovich Poirot, though, and the main thing that's interesting about The ABC Murders and the trend of recent Christie adaptations, is that it's an extra-transformative work, one that departs more deliberately and decidedly from the text than we've come to expect from our prestige-budget literary adaptations. And the fact that this is happening is pretty cool.
What I said on Twitter was that it was as if it had been dipped in a solid coating of Batman Begins-esque grimdark and then rolled in a fine layer of powdered Mike Leigh (ie gritty "kitchen sink realism": mundane, unpleasant, squalid and exhaustedly tragic. Leigh directed Meantime, the tv film in which Tim Roth and Gary Oldman first costarred, and for whose soundtrack I coined the phrase "the tinkly harpsichord of squalor").
Even better metaphor: remember that dark Disney princesses fanart trend? That's how I would describe Malkovich Poirot (but he's not the ones where the princess is just a monster or a serial killer, more the ones where the surroundings are a horror story and the princess is a bloodied and bedraggled but tough Survivor).
Well, actually, as I found out when I looked it up on IMDb after, I was more right than I knew because that's kind of what the screenwriter set out to do:
ABC Murders writer Sarah Phelps to adapt another Agatha Christie novel by David Brown at RadioTimes:
Screenwriter Sarah Phelps in ABC Murders writer reveals why "darker" Poirot isn't "reinventing Agatha Christie" by Justin Harp and Abby Robinson
So the point Phelps is making is that the ugliness she's brought to the fore in Malkovich ABC is all ugliness that has been present, typically rather subtly, in the text. The xenophobia which is a central theme in the adaptation, which angry Twitter haters and the Daily Fail referred to as 'transforming' the story into 'anti-Brexit propaganda', is an element that's always been present in the Poirot stories and is just as relevant to the period of the setting as it is to today. Christie, in Poirot and her other works, tends to observe human foibles 'waspishly', as Phelps says, but dryly - often sardonically or with a world-weary air, sometimes simply noting them and passing on with no comment, so that the mere mention is all the help you get in understanding the significance. As a result, undoubtedly many people have read the texts without understanding the subtler elements.
In reviews some of the frequentest complaints were about this added darkness. There's no question that by leaning so heavily into the underlying dark issues, Phelps has changed the whole feel of the world: that's one of the ways in which this adaptation is more transformative. We're all familiar enough with transformative works which take a different tone, or even move to a different genre, from the original (here in fandom, I mean) - though it's not as usual to see that onscreen. There's a considerable spectrum in darkness within Christie's published work and within the Suchet Poirot's ouvre, though, I'll note.
The "kitchen sink realism" was my way of referring to the grossness. Up above I used the word "squalid", which certainly applies: there's a lot of grunginess about. But grunge isn't the only grossness. A few reviews called out the focus on deliberately disgusting things - not just gore, but body horror like Cust's unhygienic masochism and his breakfast zoneout at the yellow boil on someone's neck; even the overt references to child abuse, prostitution, and violence. Direct references to bodily excretions. This stuff is crude, a whole layer of it over everything.
Grimdark stuff and grossout stuff aren't synonymous in media. Thanks to Hollywood ratings systems, brutal violence is common but realistic blood spatter is not; sex is disallowed ("darken sideboob"), particularly sexual pleasure, but murder is A-ok for the same rating. So... maybe the darkness we're examining - greed and murder, virulent racism and xenophobia - should be gross. An association of horrible acts with visceral disgust is an understandable stylistic choice. I suspect the grossout layer is really intended mainly to back up the grimdark, that is, to make the watcher's experience more uncomfortable.
The other big thing that The ABC Murders does, of course, is create an alternate universe. Poirot has an alternate backstory and a darker present; Inspector Japp even dies onscreen, which is arguably a bigger change to the universe than Ordeal by Innocence's memorably changing who done it (the other recent foray into More Transformative Adaptations to come out of the Christie estate and Sarah Phelps). This is another kind of fanfiction I'm familiar with, though I often don't find them particularly persuasive. I saw what she was doing with this one but found it kind of silly.
In addition to these two, the screenwriting just generally introduces a boatload of cliches and familiar tropes (and plain modernizations), particularly in the dialogue, which I think probably make the plot easier to follow in addition to making these implicit darknesses obvious - sometimes painfully so. I find the sorts of changes that are made to dumb down the story irritating, not least because they often introduce historical errors in the interest of seeming old-timey to people who know less about the period (see eg "The Tiffany Problem"), but I can reluctantly understand why the people commissioning literary adaptations think they're a good idea. It's sort of like the writing of a bestseller-type thriller novel, which has undeniable broad appeal even if many people (like me) dislike the style.
Other noteworthy features:
The acting. Malkovich's performance was pretty mesmerizing, as I said, and Rupert Grint was a standout. Eamon Farren did well and was sufficiently unlike Donald Sumpter's perfect, iconic book-Cust to prevent comparison for sure: he's tall and beautiful and they didn't even make any particular effort to costume him like he would vanish into the crowd or be a forgetabble generic person, which is completely unlike the book but not necessarily enough to make his role in the plot unbelievable. Andrew Buchan was good as Franklin Clarke - believable, I thought, and somewhat interesting - and Tara Fitzgerald was really memorable as Lady Clarke.
The canon Megan and Donald Fraser subplot deserved to be turned on its head: the original plot had some unfortunate slut-shaming overtones and presented some seriously unhealthy and abusive behavior from Donald Fraser that definitely didn't make him a good romantic prospect.
But in the book Thora Grey's subplot also reads as slut-shaming to me, with Christie implying through Poirot that while she hadn't had anything to do with the murder, she did have ambitions of becoming the next Lady Clarke. Rather than invert this, Phelps apparently decided... to... ask 'what if the worst of what was implied about her were true & she were in addition completely obsessed with money and would instantly go along with an elaborate serial murder plot if you dangle the money in front of her'. I mean, sure, this is making undertones explicit, but... they're more Christie's Bullshit Gender Issues undertones???
The addition of Rose: Shirley Henderson did a typically vivid and intense job of portraying a thoroughly unpleasant woman who holds down the third corner of the 'women's exploitation, sex, money, and violence' theme cluster, a nasty boardinghouse landlady who now rents out her abused daughter as an optional perk of residence. Her daughter, played by Anya Chalotra, was the interesting part of this plot, because through all the overwritten melodrama, there were some moments between her and Cust that actually felt meaningful... and it's her addition that really lends conviction to the 'women fleeing their dismal and miserable circumstances' motif that Phelps also added.
See, Megan Fraser flees literally out a window in this version, and Rose finds Cust and the courage to flee her dismal life and exploitation as well. Thora Grey, on the other hand, seems to have been twisted specifically by a desire to escape from her life (into the bliss that she imagines wealth will be); Lady Hermione is trapped in her illness (brilliantly acted in an added scene) and slow death; even Alice Asher, the first victim, was in an on-and-off abusive relationship with her violent alcoholic husband, who also exploited her economically until her death. It's probably fitting that escape is only possible for the young women, as the generational divide is also a big theme for Phelps's Christie adaptations (even more explicit in The Witness for the Prosecution).
You may be aware that I'm a passionate fan of Agatha Christie's Poirot, starring David Suchet: it's my most-rewatched media since adulthood and I have a Poirot screencap sideblog on Tumblr,
I did enjoy it, particularly Malkovich's performance. It wasn't the only great performance, but it was enough by itself to have redeemed even a significantly worse script than this one (say, one of the average quality of the recent ITV Marples, which tend to be about 30% crummy and encrusted in weirdly sensationalist tabloidesque elements like adding lesbians but only in places that will result in them being evil and/or dead). But fortunately for us all, this was a BBC production, not an ITV one (note that the latter Poirots were made for ITV, but they did mostly escape this type of treatment, with the exception of some extremely Mark Gatiss changes to some of the very late episodes).
The main thing I want to say about Malkovich Poirot, though, and the main thing that's interesting about The ABC Murders and the trend of recent Christie adaptations, is that it's an extra-transformative work, one that departs more deliberately and decidedly from the text than we've come to expect from our prestige-budget literary adaptations. And the fact that this is happening is pretty cool.
What I said on Twitter was that it was as if it had been dipped in a solid coating of Batman Begins-esque grimdark and then rolled in a fine layer of powdered Mike Leigh (ie gritty "kitchen sink realism": mundane, unpleasant, squalid and exhaustedly tragic. Leigh directed Meantime, the tv film in which Tim Roth and Gary Oldman first costarred, and for whose soundtrack I coined the phrase "the tinkly harpsichord of squalor").
Even better metaphor: remember that dark Disney princesses fanart trend? That's how I would describe Malkovich Poirot (but he's not the ones where the princess is just a monster or a serial killer, more the ones where the surroundings are a horror story and the princess is a bloodied and bedraggled but tough Survivor).
Well, actually, as I found out when I looked it up on IMDb after, I was more right than I knew because that's kind of what the screenwriter set out to do:
ABC Murders writer Sarah Phelps to adapt another Agatha Christie novel by David Brown at RadioTimes:
Phelps said [...] she’d deliberately made it her mission to subvert viewers’ expectations:
“Agatha Christie plants these little clues in her books and I pick them up and run with them. I’m honouring the secret, subversive Agatha. There’s something dangerous about her – and there’s a lot of academic work to be done on the tension in the novels between the book she knew the public wanted to read and the one she wanted to write. I always think I’m doing the version of the book she wanted to write.”
Screenwriter Sarah Phelps in ABC Murders writer reveals why "darker" Poirot isn't "reinventing Agatha Christie" by Justin Harp and Abby Robinson
“I get a lot of people going, 'You’re completely reinventing Christie!' No, I’m not. I’m just reading her, and thinking about the way she writes, and the way she puts her clues down, and that she’s quite subversive and quite tricksy. You sort of think… you know, you kind of get this idea that she’s quite cosy, and I don’t think she is at all."
Phelps went on: "I think she’s quite waspish herself, and quite challenging and tricky and all the rest of it. So I wanted to create a situation where if I’m going to write a mystery about a man who is so intensely familiar to the majority of the British reading public, or the global reading public and the global viewing public, then I have to say: Who is the person behind the persona? Is that a created persona? Who is that secret man?"
So the point Phelps is making is that the ugliness she's brought to the fore in Malkovich ABC is all ugliness that has been present, typically rather subtly, in the text. The xenophobia which is a central theme in the adaptation, which angry Twitter haters and the Daily Fail referred to as 'transforming' the story into 'anti-Brexit propaganda', is an element that's always been present in the Poirot stories and is just as relevant to the period of the setting as it is to today. Christie, in Poirot and her other works, tends to observe human foibles 'waspishly', as Phelps says, but dryly - often sardonically or with a world-weary air, sometimes simply noting them and passing on with no comment, so that the mere mention is all the help you get in understanding the significance. As a result, undoubtedly many people have read the texts without understanding the subtler elements.
In reviews some of the frequentest complaints were about this added darkness. There's no question that by leaning so heavily into the underlying dark issues, Phelps has changed the whole feel of the world: that's one of the ways in which this adaptation is more transformative. We're all familiar enough with transformative works which take a different tone, or even move to a different genre, from the original (here in fandom, I mean) - though it's not as usual to see that onscreen. There's a considerable spectrum in darkness within Christie's published work and within the Suchet Poirot's ouvre, though, I'll note.
The "kitchen sink realism" was my way of referring to the grossness. Up above I used the word "squalid", which certainly applies: there's a lot of grunginess about. But grunge isn't the only grossness. A few reviews called out the focus on deliberately disgusting things - not just gore, but body horror like Cust's unhygienic masochism and his breakfast zoneout at the yellow boil on someone's neck; even the overt references to child abuse, prostitution, and violence. Direct references to bodily excretions. This stuff is crude, a whole layer of it over everything.
Grimdark stuff and grossout stuff aren't synonymous in media. Thanks to Hollywood ratings systems, brutal violence is common but realistic blood spatter is not; sex is disallowed ("darken sideboob"), particularly sexual pleasure, but murder is A-ok for the same rating. So... maybe the darkness we're examining - greed and murder, virulent racism and xenophobia - should be gross. An association of horrible acts with visceral disgust is an understandable stylistic choice. I suspect the grossout layer is really intended mainly to back up the grimdark, that is, to make the watcher's experience more uncomfortable.
The other big thing that The ABC Murders does, of course, is create an alternate universe. Poirot has an alternate backstory and a darker present; Inspector Japp even dies onscreen, which is arguably a bigger change to the universe than Ordeal by Innocence's memorably changing who done it (the other recent foray into More Transformative Adaptations to come out of the Christie estate and Sarah Phelps). This is another kind of fanfiction I'm familiar with, though I often don't find them particularly persuasive. I saw what she was doing with this one but found it kind of silly.
In addition to these two, the screenwriting just generally introduces a boatload of cliches and familiar tropes (and plain modernizations), particularly in the dialogue, which I think probably make the plot easier to follow in addition to making these implicit darknesses obvious - sometimes painfully so. I find the sorts of changes that are made to dumb down the story irritating, not least because they often introduce historical errors in the interest of seeming old-timey to people who know less about the period (see eg "The Tiffany Problem"), but I can reluctantly understand why the people commissioning literary adaptations think they're a good idea. It's sort of like the writing of a bestseller-type thriller novel, which has undeniable broad appeal even if many people (like me) dislike the style.
Other noteworthy features:
The acting. Malkovich's performance was pretty mesmerizing, as I said, and Rupert Grint was a standout. Eamon Farren did well and was sufficiently unlike Donald Sumpter's perfect, iconic book-Cust to prevent comparison for sure: he's tall and beautiful and they didn't even make any particular effort to costume him like he would vanish into the crowd or be a forgetabble generic person, which is completely unlike the book but not necessarily enough to make his role in the plot unbelievable. Andrew Buchan was good as Franklin Clarke - believable, I thought, and somewhat interesting - and Tara Fitzgerald was really memorable as Lady Clarke.
The canon Megan and Donald Fraser subplot deserved to be turned on its head: the original plot had some unfortunate slut-shaming overtones and presented some seriously unhealthy and abusive behavior from Donald Fraser that definitely didn't make him a good romantic prospect.
But in the book Thora Grey's subplot also reads as slut-shaming to me, with Christie implying through Poirot that while she hadn't had anything to do with the murder, she did have ambitions of becoming the next Lady Clarke. Rather than invert this, Phelps apparently decided... to... ask 'what if the worst of what was implied about her were true & she were in addition completely obsessed with money and would instantly go along with an elaborate serial murder plot if you dangle the money in front of her'. I mean, sure, this is making undertones explicit, but... they're more Christie's Bullshit Gender Issues undertones???
The addition of Rose: Shirley Henderson did a typically vivid and intense job of portraying a thoroughly unpleasant woman who holds down the third corner of the 'women's exploitation, sex, money, and violence' theme cluster, a nasty boardinghouse landlady who now rents out her abused daughter as an optional perk of residence. Her daughter, played by Anya Chalotra, was the interesting part of this plot, because through all the overwritten melodrama, there were some moments between her and Cust that actually felt meaningful... and it's her addition that really lends conviction to the 'women fleeing their dismal and miserable circumstances' motif that Phelps also added.
See, Megan Fraser flees literally out a window in this version, and Rose finds Cust and the courage to flee her dismal life and exploitation as well. Thora Grey, on the other hand, seems to have been twisted specifically by a desire to escape from her life (into the bliss that she imagines wealth will be); Lady Hermione is trapped in her illness (brilliantly acted in an added scene) and slow death; even Alice Asher, the first victim, was in an on-and-off abusive relationship with her violent alcoholic husband, who also exploited her economically until her death. It's probably fitting that escape is only possible for the young women, as the generational divide is also a big theme for Phelps's Christie adaptations (even more explicit in The Witness for the Prosecution).
(no subject)
Date: 7 Feb 2019 11:27 pm (UTC)Have to seen Agatha Christie and the Truth of Murder? We watched it yesterday, and i'm not quite sure how I feel about it. (I started thinking about it, because it has lesbians, though for plot reasons, one of them is dead.)
(no subject)
Date: 7 Feb 2019 11:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Feb 2019 12:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Feb 2019 01:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9 Feb 2019 06:32 am (UTC)I really enjoyed Phelps' Ordeal by Innocence, it was definitely a lot more grimdark than I usually prefer my tv shows (even my murder mysteries!) but I found it very compelling. I don't think I've seen any of her other adaptations but I will seek them out.
(no subject)
Date: 9 Feb 2019 12:19 pm (UTC)But I still have to say that I enjoy them. Especially Ordeal by Innocence and particularly because she changed who done it (well, and how), when that particular story and similar stories of its type often, in my view, are really let down by their failure to thoroughly think through and engage with what they're doing with gender.
More specifically, I always feel like the father IS the bad guy in Ordeal by Innocence and the end twist is wrong, both because of the toxic environment she sets up and the cheapness and psychological thinness of the 'creepily maternal sexual obsession of a middle-aged laughable othered character with a Bad Young Man' - there's just so much wrong with gender and class and all that in this mess that you hardly know where to start. But those things are all symptomatic of problems with the genre that persist to the present day in crime procedurals but in many cases are at their worst in golden age classics like Christie which cover the grosser bits of misogynist stuff up with a well-mannered veneer, so I kind of appreciate her determination to re-uglify.
We just watched her version of The Witness for the Prosecution too, which is also worth a look, though she does something different with it (like, she still uglifies it obviously, but the other bits are different).