He's Still Watching You

MAN HAS ALWAYS cherished the ideal of undying love. Even if hidden in some sanctum of the mind or heart, immutable fidelity can redeem life's most tragic events or a person's most serious character flaws. Without this great love, the inspiration behind the sonnets of Shakespeare and Rilke, man is reduced to animal, functional but not transcendant, efficacious but not lasting.

George Orwell's 1984 was and is so profoundly disturbing because it dares to question the ultimate reality of this love. Michael Radford, director of the new film adaptation of 1984, recognizes and emphasizes Orwell's emotional message over the oft-discussed socio-political implications of Big Brother. On the printed page, Orwell's Oceana can be a bit dry and scholarly; on film it is nothing short of terrifying.

Radford is fully conscious that he is dealing not with an ordinary novel but an almost universally read, overanalyzed, modern WORA. Like an old friend, the film assumes both your familiarity and your desire to relive the force of some old memories. Radford leaves out the technical explanations of the Oceanic regime (as set forth in Immanuel Goldstein's didactic book) and lets the viewer fill in the holes.

For this reason, the film has a fast paced punch that the book lacked. Winston runs--not slogs--from low-level Party member to fledgling revolutionary to haggard forture victim. The scenery, too, especially the crowd shots of Hate Week and mass gatherings at the execution of war criminals, helps fuel the romantic pace of the film and sweeps the viewer along with Winston.

TO THIS END, John Hurt, as Winston, is also marvelous. Previously John Merrick in The Elephant Man and the fool in Olivier's King Lear, Hurt is the archetypal common man, his face a veritable roadmap of toil and suffering. His love scenes with the fresh-faced Suzanna Hamilton (Julia) are as tenderly pathetic as the tiny, dilapitated room in which they take place. He is dwarfed by a huge video screen as he sits hunched and writes in his diary, an action that seems both puny and heroic. Throughout the film, Hurt never loses that peculiar combination of hope and fatalistic dread that at the same time motivates and restricts Winston.

TO THIS END, John Hurt, as Winston, is also marvelous. Previously John Merrick in The Elephant Manand the fool in Olivier's King Lear. Hurt is the archetypal common man, his face a veritable roadmap of toil and suffering. His love scenes with the fresh-faced Suzanna Hamilton (Julia) are as tenderly pathetic as the tiny, dilapitated room in which they take place. He is dwarfed by a huge video screen as he sits hunched and writes in his diary, an action that seems both puny and heroic. Throughout the film, Hurt never loses that peculiar combination of hope and fatalistic dread that at the same time motivates and restricts Winston.

Against this complexity of emotion. Radford masterfully exploits the iciness of Richard Burton's Inner Party member, O'Brien. Whether torturing or consoling, Burton never moves a facial muscle or changes an inflection. He is the ideal Party member, a living synthesis of rose dogma spouted without intellect or feeling. Burton's coldly surreal performance is as horrifying as the best Becket.

Occasionally, though, this emotional barrage can be tiresome. Radford gives us endless scenes of Winston standing on a lusciously green hillside, symbolizing his longing for an ideal world. This repetition seems out of character with the action pace of the film: more at home with the bogus psychological exploitation of Pink Floyd's The Wall than Orwell. Especially pretentious is the final shot of this sequence, where we learn that this mythical "Green Acres" lies in Rm, 101, the room of everyone's worst fear. Mixing symbols like this might work for a Bergman, but it has failed almost everybody else, including, now, Radford.

Equally flaccid is Radford's one stab at interpreting Orwell. After Winston's love has been ripped out of him and he has renounced Julia and himself, he sits alone and scrawls "2 plus 2 equals" in the dust of a café tabletop. The purpose of this open-ended conclusion is a mystyery only God and Bergman, but certainly not Radford, can solve. Not only does it break the emotional tone of the film and make the viewer think, but it leaves the viewer with half-developed food for thought. A far more appropriate ending would have been Orwell's final gunshot, the final chord in a symphony of destruction and despair, which would have kept alive the pathos that otherwise invigortates the film.

The good thing about this film though, is that you don't notice its many flaws until you leave the theatre. The film bullies you in the same way the O'Brien bullies Winston, breaking down your resistance and forcing you to despair. When Winston cracks under the threat of the rat cage and screams "Do to Julia," the actual sound of the cry sends shivers up your spine in a way that mere printed words cannot.

Any one who sees the film, especially if he sees it with someone he loves, will not soon forget those shivers no matter how many holes he later pokes in the film. It is out Room 101, out worst fear. It is the death of the undying love.