Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1988

The Contenders:

The Accidental Tourist
Dangerous Liaisons (winner)
Gorillas in the Mist
Little Dorrit
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A Dickens of a Tale

Film: Little Dorrit
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

When I did the 1001 Movies list, one of the (many) things I tracked was film length. I didn’t want to end up with a bunch of three-hour movies in the last couple of months. I made it a goal to watch two of the top-10 in length movies every month, and it really helped. That’s something I’ve gotten away from in the last year or so, and because of this, the lengths of the movies I still have to watch on my current list has slowly crept up and up. Well, no more. Today I’m reversing that trend by knocking out Little Dorrit from 1988. It’s not only the longest movie I had left to watch, it was the longest by almost two hours, clocking in at just under six hours total.

This version of Little Dorrit (and this might be common—this is the only one I’ve seen and I’ve never read the book although this seems to be consistent with the novel) is broken down into two three-hour segments. In the first segment, we see the story from the perspective of Arthur Clennam (Derek Jacobi). Arthur was shipped off to China to work for his father at a young age. When the story starts, Arthur has returned home to England after the death of his father. He’s realized that his entire life has been lived at the behest of other people and that he’s never really done anything that he’s wanted. His mother (Joan Greenwood in her final role) is a fundamentally religious harridan who hasn’t left her room in a dozen years. All he wants is to get out from under her thumb.