A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Powell's 12-volume series of novels published between 1951 and 1975 is boiled down to four 100-minute-plus episodes in the 1997 British miniseries A Dance to the Music of Time, which follows the connected lives of various acquaintances from 1914-1971. Chief among them are two university classmates—reserved but empathetic writer Nicholas Jenkins (Jamed D'Arcy, James Purefoy), who serves as the viewer's surrogate, and priggish, ambitious Kenneth Widmerpool (Simon Russell Beale), who's treated with disdain at school but becomes a successful financier and left-leaning MP. The pair are surrounded by a small army of ancillary characters who drift in and out of their orbit—other classmates, relatives, and women who marry and then abandon their husbands for lovers, writers, former teachers, and musicians. Powell, who is sometimes compared to Marcel Proust (although that seems rather a stretch), is not so much interested in presenting a linear story, as he is in illustrating how people meet, separate, and then reconnect in intricate patterns over a period of many years. Not surprisingly, the compression of 12 books into four feature-length episodes isn't entirely successful—much of the dialogue finds characters reintroducing themselves to one another (and us)—and the change of actors playing Jenkins in the last episode is jarring, especially since most of the other thespians remain the same, only with aging makeup. Still, this is a literate, often witty production that is elegantly mounted and features such stalwarts as John Gielgud, Edward Fox, Miranda Richardson, and playwright Alan Bennett in supporting roles. DVD extras include cast filmographies, a biography of Powell, a photo gallery and—most usefully—a printed listing of characters (though sadly incomplete). Recommended. (F. Swietek)