The Canterville Ghost (2021) Review:
I just got done watching The Canterville Ghost from 2021 and starring Anthony Head (Anthony Stewart Head to you Buffy The Vampire Slayer fans) as Sir Simon de Canterville.
I have seen many adaptations of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost. My favorite version is the 1996 version with Patrick Stewart as Sir Simon de Canterville. My least favorite version is the the one from the 1940s. A lot of people love that one but it was mostly war time propaganda. The original novella was written in the 1880s and certainly had no Nazis in it. Also the whole idea that Sir Simon de Canterville was walled up by his own father for refusing to take part in a duel that wasn't even his own - just to beg that same father for forgiveness later. That really did not sit right for me.
In the original Cantervlille Ghost novella Sir SImon de Canterville had murdered his wife and was doomed to haunt his manor until a prophecy was fulfilled including a child shedding tears for him and pleading his case to The Angel of Death.
In the novel he had pretty much resigned himself to his fate and a slightly annoying (but friendly) American family moved into the manor. The teenage daughter of the family, Virginia (known as Ginny) ended up being the child who would aid him lift the curse. She would also end up in a romance with a neighboring duke.
In this new version with Anthony Head as the ghost, Ginny is now a twenty-two-year-old law student and there are a few nice, clever, plot twists such as the reveal that the Otis family are actually sir Simon's direct descendants and it also turned out that this version of Sir SImon's biggest crime was actually turning away his Roma wife, whom he had handfasted with (unofficially married) to maintain his family's status. He had immediately regretted doing this and sought to set things right with her, with stolen family jewels, but he was caught by her brothers, who thought he had just left her to die in the cold- so they walled him up to starve in his family home.
This version of The Canterville Ghost borrows a lot of elements that were created for the 1996 version with Patrick Stewart such as giving Sir Simon a familiar (an animal companion). This version is a talking rat. The talking animal is a little jarring at first but I guess he's mostly there for comic relief and to remind you that this is (despite the ghost story) supposed to be a family-friendly mini-series.
This version was broken into a four part mini-series and... honestly it did not need to be four parts. There's one episode that is almost entirely set at a cricket game and the whole episode is pretty much filler.
There are two things I disliked about this mini-series (besides the cricket game that went on too long). The first being that SIr Simon makes repeated agist jokes about Ginny such as calling her a spinister, and "Past child bearing years." These jokes were... shall we say cringy, considering the version of Ginny in the original novella was only slightly younger than this version and she was called a "gentle girl" by Sir Simon in the original novella from 1880. This version of Ginny is twenty-two-years-old. It doesn't make sense that Virginia Otis is the focus for age-based barbs from Sir Simon. They aren't funny. I get that the writing is trying to poke fun of the agism of the era Sir Simon would have lived in but those jokes didn't even exist in the 1880s novella, in fact Oscar Wilde, in his writing, had a habit of considering twenty-somethings of men and women to still be children and he repeatedly called twenty-something men in The Picture of Dorian Gray "boy" and Virginia was referred to (in The Canterville Ghost novella) as a child, even though she was in her late teens in the original story.
The age jokes got tired fast. They felt as ...cringy and repetitive as the "child bearing hips" jokes in Tim Burton's comedy version of Dark Shadows. These jokes are jarring and don't really fit the story or how Sir Simon acts with other characters or even how he usually acts with Virginia.
Also pretty much all film versions of Sir Simon de Canterville (except the 1940s version...) are into Shakespeare. He must know The Merchant of Venice and yet he seems baffled by the idea of a woman defense attorney. The jokes about agism and sexism from his mortal life era got tired quick.
The second thing that bothered me about the mini-series was... the weird Americanisms. I say this as an American- the portrayal of American culture in this mini-series was weird. It was like it was written by a British teenager who had a strange, abstract, almost alien planet idea of what Americans are like based on outdated British TV show stereotypes. Yes, I admit many Americans would fly an American flag at the top of a British manor house but the Elvis impersonator singing The Monkee's "I'm a believer" was just odd. Also some of the supposedly American characters had awful, very fake sounding, accents. Why is it so many British people think America = Texas? Texas is the only place like Texas. The rest of the US is not like that, I promise.
At least they made up for this by making Mr. Otis (Virginia's father) extremely kind. A mellow, laid back, almost hippie type of character. He was extremely out going and kind even though he was a bit socially inept. They had managed to make him very likable.
The fact that twenty-two-year-old Virginia kept bringing up American laws as if they have any bearing in England with a sixteenth century Ghost also got a little annoying. She should have known better. And it just perpetuates the stereotype of American arrogance that we think American law applies everywhere in exactly the same way. Oh, that reminds me of something else that bothered me too. Virginia (who isn't even a full lawyer yet) apparently screwed up a case for an eighteen-year-old girl who was convicted of murdering her abusive stepfather. Virginia is told repeatedly that she is not at fault for this but it's never rectified. We're just casually told that there's this eighteen-year-old serving life in prison for murdering her abuser and it's never, ever set right. For a family movie that's quite dark. That bothered me.
They also somehow forgot that the stain on the floor was supposed to be the blood of Sir Simon's wife...
A petty detail about how Sir Simon's powers worked bugged me but not so much that it ruined the show. Sir Simon is slightly corporeal. That is to say he's made up of a very fine matter that disperses when he takes a mist-like form so he cannot actually pass through solid matter but rather tiny cracks and holes in this decorporealized form. I have used similar lore when role playing or writing for the character of Count Dracula on IMVU. It works for vampires that take mist form but but I don't think I really like it for ghosts. I've seen Anne Rice use a similar lore to account for how some of her spirits function but I still don't care for it.
Other than these two things I thought this was a fairly decent mini-series, probably in my top five favorite adaptations of The Canterville Ghost. Yes, I have seen that many versions as to have a top five list. And again, no, the 1940s version is not on that list. I liked the 1940s version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, just not the 1940s version of The Canterville Ghost.
In the first episode I had thought they would draw out the parents not believing in ghosts and being skeptical for far, far too long but mercifully this was only in the first episode and they fast accepted that ghosts are most-assuredly real in his story.
The scene where Ginny had to plead Sir SImon's case and learn the true history behind him and his Roma wife's deaths felt weirdly like it had come out of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens. A bureaucratic afterlife that is comical but darkly cold and cynical and detached where the "angels" and other entities seem to care more about protocol than about justice or love. I half expected to see Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens turn up.
This certainly was an interesting take on The Canterville Ghost. There were many times where it felt like Anthony Head was portraying Sir Simon as having a perpetual head-cold. And he certainly had an unusual choice in vocabulary. I still think Patrick Stewart did a better job as the ghost but Anthony Head was decent. And it had a good, satisfying ending.
0 out of 5 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
