Refuge in "Bleak House"

This handwriting means something to Lady Dedlock, but just two episodes into the series, we don't yet know what. And having four more installments of "Bleak House" to go is like having a particularly plush cushion of narrative to sink into -- it's the TV-watching equivalent of a luxurious cat stretch. The series has two directors (Justin Chadwick for the first half, Susanna White for the second), and was adapted by Andrew Davies (who wrote the script for the much-loved 1995 BBC miniseries "Pride and Prejudice"). And although I was almost scared off, very early on, by a scene featuring bewigged blowhards gassing on in an English courtroom -- the kind of scene that usually screams "Masterpiece Theatre," and not in the good way -- I quickly gave myself over to the seductive languor of the storytelling. "Bleak House" may not move fast, but its grace is its own kind of liveliness. And while the series pays the proper amount of attention to Victorian atmospherics (there are country houses rendered lonely and ghostlike in misty rain, and grimy city back alleys where mothers clutch their ailing babies with mournful desperation), as with all great Dickens adaptations, it's the characters, and the actors who play them, who make everything click.

"Bleak House" is, among other things, Dickens' excoriation of the absurd and highly inefficient English legal system of the day. And this adaptation captures his great delight in puncturing hypocrisy and pretension. Dickens had a predilection for angelic woman characters, a convention that can work well enough on the page but often turns deadly on-screen: "Goodness" and "generosity" are flat, gray qualities that are almost impossible for actors to play with any spark. And yet Anna Maxwell Martin, as the sturdy, sensible orphan Esther Summerson, clues us in to what a character who can always be relied upon, whose judgment is always sound and fair, goes through when she's left alone with her feelings at the end of the day.

Martin's face is undeniably youthful. It still has a touch of baby fat around it -- at times she resembles a Victorian bisque baby doll with a pleasantly placid expression. But she makes you feel the weariness of always being the responsible sort, even though Esther would never admit to feeling that weariness herself. When she learns that the young surgeon to whom she finds herself attracted, Allan Woodcourt (Richard Harrington), is leaving for India, she bears the news stoically, and yet the flicker of disappointment that shadows her face has the weight of a rainstorm. Later, when she momentarily believes that, before his departure, he has left flowers at Bleak House for another woman, the lunar glow of her skin dims just a little, but visibly. And when, seconds later, she learns that she's mistaken, that Woodcourt has left the flowers for her, her relief is so radiant it practically changes the contours of her face. Esther is the sort of woman who doesn't ask for much in life, which is why we need to believe, for her sake, in the restoration of possibilities, if not in the absolute certainty of her future happiness.

This "Bleak House" is peopled with a vast assortment of characters, all beautifully cast -- and in any Dickens adaptation, that's only the first hurdle, but it's a crucial one. There's Miss Flite, played by Pauline Collins (perhaps best known to American audiences for her role as saucy housemaid Sarah on the Masterpiece Theatre chestnut "Upstairs, Downstairs"), a dithery elderly woman who spends her days at the Court of Chancery following the proceedings in the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case, and her evenings caring tenderly for the various caged birds who share her small room; Mr. Guppy (Burn Gorman), an oily and ambitious young law clerk who bears an unnerving resemblance to the young Willem Dafoe (and who, after being rebuffed by Esther, can surely be up to no good); and Ada Clare (Carey Mulligan) and Richard Carstone (Patrick Kennedy), John Jarndyce's two young wards, who potentially have much to gain from the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce lawsuit but who also, as their guardian keeps warning them, have much to lose. Carstone is likable but ridiculous (he can't settle on a profession, largely because he assumes he'll never need one), and Ada -- Esther has been brought to Bleak House as her companion -- is pretty, openhearted and bland. We don't want anything truly disastrous to befall these two, yet we're left wondering, as the case becomes more and more tangled, is there enough good to go around?

Next page: Does Lady Dedlock mean well, or does she intend evil?