Sarah Gadon in Alias Grace. Image courtesy of CBC Television.
Margaret Atwood is having a bit of a moment, actually. The true nature of the monsters that have been hiding in plain sight all these years is being gradually revealed in our society, and the resonance of her work is being felt throughout the land. Obviously the most “in” property of hers right now is The Handmaid’s Tale, which in the 1980s was a bit of dark speculative fiction about the US becoming a theological wasteland that oppressed and raped women and which now in 2019 is edging ever closer to a depiction of real-life. I myself have found it immensely difficult to get into The Handmaid’s Tale for purely stylistic and narrative reasons – I think the show looks terrible, and the choices they made in adapting it from the book make it kind of hard to sit with.
A much, much better adaption of Atwood’s work in my opinion is the mini-series Alias Grace. One reason is the period setting, some time in the 19th century. I do dearly love a good period piece, and while the Handmaid’s Tale also has period elements in it which are meant to draw out Gilead’s regressiveness, Alias Grace is the real thing and frankly I just think it looked better. The star of Alias Grace is Sarah Gadon, and Gadon is electric. She has only a small part in Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, but she owns the scenes she is in. I don’t really understand, actually, why she isn’t more famous. She’s a spectacular actress. Nothing against Elizabeth Moss, who I also like very much. But she’s never going to command the screen with movie star charisma the way Gadon does.
And finally the narrative in Alias Grace is really clever and really ambiguous, taking full advantage of the period setting and Gadon’s acting chops. So the movie is basically about a woman, Grace Marks, who has been imprisoned for murder and the basic question that ties the whole thing together is whether the is possessed by an evil spirit, whether she’s a malicious deceiver who killed in full knowledge of what she was doing, or whether she is a woman traumatized by power imbalances in society who kind of splits the middle between those two camps telling people what they want to hear in order to eke out survival. And the narrative is so deft, so elegantly structured and acted with such subtle brilliance that by the time the show finishes there’s plenty of evidence to support all three interpretations.
The structure of this narrative is really an achievement, probably because it comes from a book and books (the good ones anyway) are often very intricately plotted with a lot of attention paid to detail. But none of this would work without Gadon’s acting, as she pulls off a neat balancing act between being outright evil, outright practical and outright insane - or something in between. There is a scene late in the series featuring an exorcism that is a masterclass in acting.
Ultimately, the film is about how society treats women and what women feel they need to do to survive. It’s wrapped up in a very sleek and entertaining historical period veneer, and told mainly though flash-backs and recollections which calls the veracity of the entire narrative even further into questions. But ultimately, in my opinion, the story is about a wily and clever woman who is repeatedly forced to do whatever she can to survive, and often this means figuring out exactly what people (almost always males) want to hear and catering to that. She is a survivor, and she knows how to use her wits to survive in a man’s world. Packed with symbolism, intrigue and just damn entertaining I think this is the best adaptation of Atwood we’ve had to date.
