Getting Lady Chatterley Right, At Long Last

 

Adapting any novel for a feature length film is always a kayak run down class V rapids, but when your novel is D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," the cauldron is especially daunting.

Any print to film challenge has multiple hurdles to leap:

1/ Every reader has already seen the character's faces, bodies and habitus in his or her own mind's eye, so the casting is always treacherous, finding just the right look, voice, carriage for each character. 

I don't know who did the casting for Netflix's Lady Chatterley, but whoever it was got each character just right, with the possible exception of Clifford, who I had pictured as a young Michael Redgrave type, or possibly a young Christopher Plummer, with fine features, high cheekbones and thin lips. 

But that is a quibble. 

Lady Constance Chatterley herself, Emma Corrin, has the sculpted features, the asthenic qualities which give her instant vulnerability and upper class credibility. Jack O'Connell is just right for Mellors, not movie star hunky, but plenty good looking enough to be believable as a temptation for Lady Chatterley, and her first look at him bathing naked in an outdoor shower beside his hut is lovely, as just a glimmer of a smile flits across her face and you know he will set her fantasizing.

2/ Each important character and incident has to be managed and choices made to keep the length down to about two hours. The screenwriter here, David Magee, simply has made all the right choices. 

In the case of characters, all the important folks made the cut, and the decision to economize on the Irish playwright, Michaelis, is a sound one. His role is just a cameo in this version, but that's all he really needs.  In the book Constance has a brief, unsatisfactory coital experience with him, but he only really serves to show how unsatisfactory simple sex is for Lady Chatterley.  He is simply too uncouth for her, and he complains about her climaxing before he has a chance to do so, as if that is her fault.

But all the other scenes, the important scenes, are there, from her initial sighting of Mellors, to her holding the hatchlings, "New Life!" to her mad, naked  dance in the rain, to the wheel chair scenes between Clifford, Mellors and Constance. All the important stuff makes the cut.

3/ The actual themes are every bit as clear and artfully presented in the film as in the book:  Laure de Clermont Tonnerre has kept the pace exactly correct, made the right choices presenting the sex, which has to be volcanic and raw to make Constance's choices understandable. Even the brief scenes of Lady Chatterley masturbating have a clear point--she is missing sex, which you knew from earlier scenes she had once enjoyed. 

Clifford's belief that his class was meant to rule and the lower classes to serve; Clifford's idea that Constance should produce an heir by taking on the "right sort" of lover; Clifford's ruthlessness about keeping the coal miners repressed with low wages and his lack of sympathy for the common folk whose economic fate he controls and most shockingly, the deep seeded ideas about not mixing classes.  

The Neflix Lady Chatterley highlights Constance's rebellion against the gilded cage in which she finds herself trapped. When she raises objection to Clifford's plans to keep wages low, she is told she is thinking like a woman, and when Clifford tells her she should feel free to acquire a lover because he cannot get an erection, that might seem open minded and even generous on his part, but he conditions this liberty with the comment, straight from Lawrence's original text, that he trusts her to choose the right sort of fellow, not the sort he might object to--so even in his emancipation proclamation, he still insists on control.

All this prepares you for the gradual alienation Constance develops toward her husband, and it allows us to understand what Mellors means when he says the upper class men he sees at Wragby, the estate, are "dead" men. Constance knows he has chosen exactly the right word for what she has been seeing in the drawing rooms, the dining table and the village, where she can feel the "drizzle of resentment" from the coal miners and villagers, as Lawrence put it. You see that drizzle on screen here.

Hilda, Constance's sister, who is her champion and her rock, is, still, apart from all her stellar qualities, shocked and repulsed by her choice of lover: For Constance to choose a servant rather than someone of her own upper class is tantamount to the plantation mistress at Tara taking on a Negro lover. 

No important detail is omitted: Even the story that both Constance and Hilda had taken on lovers as adolescents, when they were at school in Germany, surfaces and this  becomes important as it serves to demonstrate that this class of English is not so constrained as to think sex belongs only within the confines of  marriage, but they do believe that there are "proper" partners.

And, of course, Hilda fears Constance is simply enraptured by the sex with Mellors, given her husband's inability to satisfy her, which to her is simply not the point of a man. For Constance, the point of the man is the rapture, not to mention his capacity for tenderness and the other qualities she finds more important than his social status. She says they should escape England and flee to Australia, where they can be "left alone."  This is D.H. Lawrence peeking through the visuals. 

I've read "Lady Chatterley" at least four times through the years. The first time, I was simply too young and too unsophisticated to see the class issues--all I was interested in was the sex.  Later, I saw the story as primarily about the notion of fidelity and betrayal. Later still, the class prejudices leapt out, and I wondered how I could have been so dense as to miss all that.   And finally, the last time, I saw it as an ode to life and the imperative to pursue every day as a gift, because, as mortality begins to loom large, you look back and think how silly societal strictures really are.

Scanning through some of the reviews of this Netflix version online I've been surprised and disappointed about how thoroughly most reviewers have missed the essential quality of this Netflex version. There have been other attempts at "Lady Chatterley" -- all of them forgettable. 

But this one is a gem. The director, the actors, the casting director, the screen writer and likely a lot of folks I don't even know about like the cinematographer have all succeeded where all others have failed before them. 

If there was ever a film which demonstrates how it is actually possible to transform a print book into a living film, this Netflix effort has achieved that.

This version is a triumph and it is the only film version I can say would be worth watching even if you've never read the book, before you read the book, because it is that good.