I read Ford Madox Ford's most celebrated novel "The Good Soldier" only last year and came to this dramatisation of his "Parade's End" with a good degree of expectation, tempered by some reservations about the anticipated over-writing by Tom Stoppard in bringing it to the small-screen. Reservations because I knew in advance that every character would be miraculously blessed with extreme loquaciousness, with almost no room for the plain everyday conversation that surely made even the Edwardian world go round, particularly in the trenches. Thus even ordinary soldiers in the heat of battle boast about their skill in translating sonnets into Latin pentameter, that most mundane of talents! At another point, Benedict Cumberbutch's Christopher Tiejens' character's young lover Valentine declares that their love is "like literature", which was probably the most opaque of a whole army (pun intended) of similarly opaque phrases proffered here.
As for the characters, I found them too many and too shallow and callow. I couldn't imagine cold-fish Tiejiens having an impulsive stays-busting romp in a train carriage with the venal but voluptuous Victoria, who, we learn later, uses her soon-afterwards child-birth as the means to trap him into marriage, for a child who isn't his. Other characters come and go, a mixture of the snobbish, the eccentric and the parasitic, individuals amongst them often re-emerging at the least expected moment, which for my money didn't help the narrative.
Acting wise, I found Cumberbutch underwhelming as the central character in the drama. He can do stiff upper lip crossed with pained guilt but little in-between. Rebecca Hall as his harlot of a wife does better as the promiscuous go-getter while Adelaide Clemens as his too obviously boyish-looking suffragette mistress never once appears natural and likewise fails to project her grand passion which supposedly outlasts the war.
The war scenes themselves are magnificently rendered in their realism and horror. I just wish that some of that realism had extended deeper into this drama of upper-class nabobs the likes of which I couldn't give a damn about.
As for the characters, I found them too many and too shallow and callow. I couldn't imagine cold-fish Tiejiens having an impulsive stays-busting romp in a train carriage with the venal but voluptuous Victoria, who, we learn later, uses her soon-afterwards child-birth as the means to trap him into marriage, for a child who isn't his. Other characters come and go, a mixture of the snobbish, the eccentric and the parasitic, individuals amongst them often re-emerging at the least expected moment, which for my money didn't help the narrative.
Acting wise, I found Cumberbutch underwhelming as the central character in the drama. He can do stiff upper lip crossed with pained guilt but little in-between. Rebecca Hall as his harlot of a wife does better as the promiscuous go-getter while Adelaide Clemens as his too obviously boyish-looking suffragette mistress never once appears natural and likewise fails to project her grand passion which supposedly outlasts the war.
The war scenes themselves are magnificently rendered in their realism and horror. I just wish that some of that realism had extended deeper into this drama of upper-class nabobs the likes of which I couldn't give a damn about.