How Not to Adapt “Anne of Green Gables”
By Sarah LarsonMay 11, 2017
The betrayal of “Anne with an E,” a new CBC-Netflix adaptation, isn’t in the aesthetics but in the emotion.PHOTOGRAPH BY MARVIN MOORE / NETFLIXIn 1985, Kevin Sullivan’s screen adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved 1908 novel, “Anne of Green Gables,” reawakened the story for a new generation. The production, visually stunning and emotionally tender, showcases the beauty of Prince Edward Island, where Anne (Megan Follows), an orphan, is taken in by the aging siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert (Richard Farnsworth and Colleen Dewhurst). The pleasure of its narrative style—which does not focus on the hardship of orphanhood or of farm life in the eighteen-hundreds—creates friendly terrain in which to plant seeds of emotional complexity. Sullivan’s thoughtful writing and direction mirror Montgomery’s wry, loving tone, which understands the absurdity of life and approaches it with humor, à la Jane Austen. “Anne of Green Gables” is fuelled by ideas about pride, kindness, trust, insecurity, academic seriousness, and a kind of proto-feminism, and it expresses them through a series of mostly comic plots, which Sullivan re-created perfectly. Anne insults the town snob and is forced to apologize, which she does theatrically; Anne accidentally gets a friend drunk; Anne accidentally dyes her hair green; Anne dreams of a dress with puffed sleeves, and Matthew shyly buys it for her. Anne’s schoolroom rival and eventual love interest, Gilbert Blythe, played by Jonathan Crombie, managed to combine dreaminess and respectfulness—traits that stayed with many of us forever.
To its credit, in our dangerously ahistorical era, “Anne with an E,” a new CBC-Netflix “Anne of Green Gables” adaptation, which comes out tomorrow, aims to avoid sentimentality. Its Emmy-winning showrunner, director, and writer, Moira Walley-Beckett, late of “Breaking Bad,” wanted it to “look like a Jane Campion film, and it does,” she told the CBC. But Walley-Beckett doesn’t stop at aesthetics. “I wanted to ground it in the foundation of some of the story and some of the plot that’s already there but not fully explored,” she said. “So it’s like I sort of open up the spine of the book, reach in between the lines of the pages, and chart some new territory.”
She charted the hell out of it. The result is part the “Anne” we know and love—apple blossoms and hard-won understandings, Cuthberts, raspberry cordial—and part untrustworthy stranger, not “Anne of Green Gables” at all. It adds new dialogue, scenes, and plots; it subtracts jollity and subtlety. And it’s no documentary. It opens with a sequence that evokes “Game of Thrones”: camera sweeping over coastal terrain, strings and pounding drums, horse and rider galloping through water. Then it shifts to an illustrated indie-rock video of a title sequence, set to a song by the Tragically Hip. Message received: this is not your beloved Megan Follows series. (Don’t get me started on the new Gilbert.)
At times, “Anne with an E” feels like it’s slipped genres, like one of those comedies-recut-as-horror-movies trailers that made the rounds a few years ago. Walley-Beckett suffuses her scenes with a grim grayish light, showing us the mud, the dirt, the cold. Anne, fifteen-year-old Amybeth McNulty, who was thirteen during filming, is, appropriately, thin, red-haired, freckled, and sharp. In early episodes, she’s bedraggled, with jagged sections of hair falling loose from her braids. She’s quick to anger. When her face is at rest, she has a slightly open, turned-down mouth, as if waiting for the next indignity to come her way. It always does, and when it does she yells at it. When she goes into raptures about the White Way of Delight or the Lake of Shining Waters, she sounds anxious. Anne’s wild imagination—her dreams of being named Cordelia, or of being a Tennyson heroine—is presented as a “protective mechanism,” as Walley-Beckett put it, from her tough childhood. This is a good idea, and is suggested in Montgomery’s books, but Walley-Beckett wanted more. So we see flashbacks to Anne’s life with an abusive family and in the orphanage—another fine idea in principle. In one flashback, vicious girls, spitting threats and insults, taunt Anne with a dead mouse in a grimy alcove; afterward, she comforts herself by stroking its fur sorrowfully. When we cut back to the present, she says, in a hollow tone, “I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” as dead-eyed as the twins in “The Shining.” We should empathize here, but we’re too busy seething.
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The betrayal of “Anne with an E” isn’t in the aesthetics but in the emotion. Soon after, the series shows us another act of amazing invented cruelty. In the book, and in the 1985 adaptation, Marilla’s heirloom brooch goes missing, and, thinking Anne has stolen it, Marilla forbids her from going to a picnic. In Walley-Beckett’s version, Marilla sends her back to the orphanage. When the mistake is realized, Matthew jumps on his horse, like Darcy off to force Wickham to the altar; that opening sequence was him trying to out-gallop a train. What follows is Dickensian and pointless, involving Anne hitching a ride to parts unknown with a milkman; Matthew running into a city street and smashing a carriage window with his head; Matthew staggering around the orphanage in mummy-like bandages; wailing; agony; poetry recitations for hire; bitterness; hardness; and a Bible-side reconciliation, in which Anne takes the surname “Cuthbert.” The theme of the brooch episode, as Montgomery wrote it, was the fragile trust between foster parent and child—and she dramatized it powerfully, and more effectively, with nothing but a shawl and a picnic.
Meanness is everywhere in “Anne with an E,” as if life in the rural Maritimes wasn’t hard enough without hissing and insults. During the “Carrots” incident, when Gilbert teases Anne about her hair and Anne, hurt and embarrassed, whacks him with her slate, she doesn’t hit him over the top of his head—she smashes it in his face, with the casual violence of a Mob enforcer. Townspeople taunt her like an angry mob in a dream sequence; classmates say things like “I won’t eat next to dirty trash!”
Walley-Beckett told the CBC that she wanted to create “a seamless interaction between Lucy Maud’s words and mine,” and said that she succeeded. “What’s been wonderful is that it is seamless,” she said. “We’ve accomplished a seamless merging of this contemporary adaptation and Lucy’s words, so that by the time we get to the end, you can’t really tell what was there and what wasn’t.” The fact that she believes this to be true indicates that she doesn’t really understand Montgomery’s work—and therefore hasn’t earned the right to change it. There are joys to be had in “Anne with an E”—the injustices almost always right themselves in the end, with Anne’s sobs of relief to follow—but little lightness.
If the 1985 production sanitizes the past aesthetically, it also respects us enough to let us think for ourselves. Lionel Trilling, writing about E. M. Forster, pointed out that people often fail to realize that the serious and the solemn are not the same thing. “Nowadays even the literate reader is likely to be unschooled in the comic tradition and unaware of the comic seriousness,” he wrote. “Our suspicion of gaiety in art perhaps signifies an inadequate seriousness in ourselves.”
In 1999, the Canadian director Patricia Rozema made an adaptation of “Mansfield Park” that brought slavery, sexual abuse, and sexual hypocrisy out of the background of Austen’s narrative and also put words from Austen’s own letters and diaries into Fanny Price’s dialogue. It was confident, audacious, and true to Austen’s world view. In an era of historical productions that romanticized wealth and, inadvertently, empire, “Mansfield Park” was refreshingly complex. It also managed to be warmhearted: tenderly acted and directed, finding love and humor between innocents in that troubled world. (Rozema directs an episode of “Anne with an E.”) A realistic but warmhearted “Anne” could have been made, with these actors and these aesthetics, if its creator had had faith in Montgomery’s narrative and had more clearly seen the power of what’s already there. I would have loved to see such an “Anne”—especially now, when we need hope and realism together.
Sarah Larson, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2007.
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