This less than illuminating drama leaves us in the dark
Here we go again with one of the BBC’S dark dramas. I don’t mean tonally, although The Luminaries (BBC One) is a tale of murder and weirdness. I mean, literally, dark. Look, I know they didn’t have brilliant lighting in 19th-century New Zealand but help us out here, we can’t see a thing. And it’s not as if the rest of
The Luminaries is particularly illuminating. Who shot that man in the first two minutes – the man who looked dead but then sat up again? Is the man who turned up in the bar halfway through the same man we saw 10 minutes earlier, or the one who fell through the saloon door 15 minutes later?
The BBC has not done much promotion for this six-part adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prizewinning novel set during the 19thcentury Gold Rush, and on first inspection it is clear why. It is handsomely shot, has an eye-catching turn from Eve Hewson in the lead role, but fails to spark. There is too much going on, and not enough explanation for us to care much about any of it.
Problems are apparent from the beginning, when Hewson’s Anna Wetherell stands on deck as her ship approaches land. It is the end of a lengthy voyage from England, but Anna looks fresh as a daisy – not unlike Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins. She encounters Emery Staines (Yesterday’s Himesh Patel) and after a brief conversation, mostly about albatrosses, they arrange to meet for dinner. When she doesn’t turn up, a worried Emery sets off in search of her, saying: “There was a kind of magic between us, something absolute.” Yet in their time together the pair had zero chemistry.
Hewson (the daughter of U2’s Bono, in her first major television role) doesn’t maintain that Mary Poppins vibe for long. We go back and forth in time, and see that Anna has soon become an opium-taking prostitute. Not that this harms her looks; if anything it improves them, giving her the air of a Vogue model on a particularly dusty photo shoot. How this fate befell her, and why she was arrested at the beginning in a dress filled with gold of which she claimed to have no knowledge, will no doubt be explained bit by bit. It has something to do with Lydia Wells, played by Eva Green (Casino Royale, Penny Dreadful) as a sort of preraphaelite Wild West mystic who runs a saloon bar creepily named The House of Many Wishes and which might be a brothel. According to the production notes, Green is doing an American accent.
Catton has adapted her own novel – an 832-page doorstopper – and simplified the structure. “Middle of nowhere, middle of the night… a politician, a savage and a whore. Sounds like a riddle, the beginning of a joke,” said the local lawman of the initial set-up. I confess to not having read the book, but it was dubbed the “Kiwi Twin Peaks” and there is no resemblance to that on the screen.
Booker Prizes tend to be won for form and language and literary ambition, rather than a rollicking good story. We are only at episode one, so perhaps this will be answered later in the series, but I itched to know Anna’s background or at least to have some historical context. Was it common for Englishwomen in the 1860s to travel alone to the other side of the world in search of gold? Was it unusual to be articulate and polished but entirely illiterate? Were we watching something historically truthful?
It sounds odd to say that a period drama feels dated. But the BBC has been doing such great work of late with modern-day dramas – Sally Rooney’s Normal People, last week’s Salisbury Poisonings, Michaela Coel’s
extraordinary I May Destroy You – that The Luminaries seemed a stuffy throwback by comparison. It doesn’t help that this sort of thing is best suited to autumn, when the nights are drawing in, but has been plonked in the middle of the summer schedule.
The dialogue certainly felt modern at times, particularly in the scenes with Emery and his friends. At other times, it seemed to be aiming for the spare feel of a spaghetti Western, as when the identity of a dead man was revealed. Gaoler: “His name is Crosbie Wells.” Anna: “Crosbie Wells?” Magistrate: “Who is Crosbie Wells?” Gaoler: “Quite. Miss Wetherell, who is Crosbie Wells?” A few scenes later, but nine months earlier as the timeline goes, a man crashes into the saloon with a bagful of gold. Anna: “Who is that?” Lydia: “That is my husband, Crosbie Wells.” I think Crosbie Wells might be central to the plot. But it was so dark that I still couldn’t pick him out of a line-up.
The Luminaries ★★