Sarah Waters made a recent stop in town to introduce a screening of Fingersmith at the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (and to read from her new WWII-London novel, The Night Watch, at Bailey/Coy). But Fingersmith, like Tipping the Velvet before it, was a book practically designed for surreptitious under-the-covers reading, and the BBC adaptation is better suited to guilty DVD indulgence than a trip to the cinema. If the novel was Dickens without the didacticism, this two-episode DVD is The L Word for unabashed nerds.
The plot is a gloriously suspenseful pastiche of several Victorian sources, updated with some modern psychology and a dose of corseted girl-on-girl action. Sue Trinder (Sally Hawkins), the illiterate daughter of a hanged murderess, grows up on an infant farm run by Mrs. Sucksby (Imelda Staunton). Sucksby's Lant Street residence, modeled on Fagin's den of thieves in Oliver Twist, is a hub for criminals of all sorts, and Sue the pickpocket (or "fingersmith," as Victorian slang and modern double-entendre would have it) soon hooks up with the con artist Richard Rivers, known as Gentleman (Rupert Evans in baby-cheeked Johnny Depp drag). Rivers plans to marry the wealthy Maud Lilly (a wonderfully impassive Elaine Cassidy) and then immediately hustle her into an insane asylum; Sue is conscripted to gain Maud's trust as her personal, ahem, maid. As the young women grow closer, their mutual betrayal becomes at once more painful and more assured.
The sinister doubles and madhouse abductions of the second episode owe a massive debt to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. But it's impossible to see the plot twists coming, thanks to an adaptation by screenwriter Peter Ransley that keeps the viewer locked into Sue's point of view even as it relates Maud's decidedly Gothic story. Fingersmith's locations are vivid. Even taking into account an overactive fog machine, the London underworld and perverted British countryside are far more absorbing than in Roman Polanski's pallid Oliver Twist. What makes Fingersmith truly delightful, though, is its top-shelf cast, from slumming character actors like Staunton and Charles Dance to the young trio at the movie's center, all portraying Victorian stereotypes that are subtly and ingeniously off. The only disappointment—and it is mild—is the DVD extras, which are confined to lame character profiles and a featurette full of folks complimenting one another. Perhaps anything more would be asking a television miniseries to take itself too seriously—but Sarah Waters's rabid fans have done that already, so why not?
Both source novels are enjoying a renaissance outside of the Sarah Waters oeuvre; besides Polanski's Oliver Twist, there's also the Andrew Lloyd Webber adaptation of The Woman in White. The musical enjoyed a lucrative West End run (though the reviews were less than enthusiastic) and is opening in New York in two weeks. The evidence is plentiful, but if there's something Zeitgeist-y about Fingersmith, I can't put my finger on it. Still, the DVD is great, smutty fun.
