Miniseries Review: Treasure Island (2012)
One of the things I like about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is its end: rather than gaining valuable experience from this adventure which Makes Him A ManTM, Jim Hawkins tells us that he still has nightmares about his ordeal. Shipping off with pirates might be fun for the reader, but it isn’t character-building or fun for anyone involved.
The recent Treasure Island two-part miniseries captures this almost perfectly. Almost.
There’s a lot to like about this adaptation. The visuals are lovely (save an occasional jerky camera trick which didn’t work for me). The casting director got the memo that sailing crews picked up sailors from all over the place, so a fair number of the characters are Spanish, black (including Billy Bones and Mr. Arrow), Chinese, or Indian. Eddie Izzard is a delightful Long John Silver, turning from a very persuasive upstanding tavernkeeper persona to chillingly callous on a dime, and of course he has some excellent funny bits. He’s also a key component in the movie’s themes of systemic societal violence. However, his role in the end, I thought, had mixed results for his character development and the movie as a whole.
Silver is a tricky character in adaptations, because he’s so interesting and engaging that it’s tempting to have the other characters end up on his side. That old adaptation from 1950 or so had one of the characters exclaim, as they watched him make his escape, something along the lines of, “You know, I hope he makes it!” But in the book, Jim has PTSD nightmares involving Silver’s parrot, and it’s highly possible that Silver is a stone-cold sociopath. Jim does comment that it is to be hoped that Silver is living comfortably with his wife somewhere, because he’s almost certainly going to hell later, but that’s hardly becoming buddies.
The most interesting thing about the movie is the way it makes all the pirates, not just Silver, a little more sympathetic even when they’re unredeemably vicious by the time we meet them. A movie in which you don’t have to be an innocent victim to be a victim - that’s not something I see too often!
The book doesn’t give a lot of context for the pirates. They’re bad, they’re violent, they’re greedy, so of course a life of piracy appeals to them, right? Oh, some may have fallen into it and been corrupted - Ben Gunn, maybe - but if you’re a good kid like Jim, you can resist.
The movie takes this further by asking what kind of society these pirates are from. The prologue segment with the pirates sets it up: Flint informs Silver and most of his crew that he isn’t going to give them their shares of the treasure after all, and Silver and some others escape in one of the boats while Flint’s loyalists shoot cannon balls at them (which loses Silver his leg, rather than the muddled and possibly untrue story he tells in the book, and I might have the details mixed up but I think Pew is blinded here as well). The payoff starts once Squire Trelawney is introduced. In the book, he’s a well-meaning fool whose one useful skill is that he’s an excellent shot, presumably because as a rich landowner he has time to practice. In the movie, he’s a much harder man. He mentions his father’s Navy service several times, with particular emphasis on how you have to maintain discipline onboard - and then demonstrates his idea of discipline when Mr. Arrow, instead of falling overboard in a storm while drunk as in the book, punches Trelawney while drunk and Trelawney has him keel-hauled, which kills Arrow. He leaves Redruth behind to seize the Admiral Benbow Inn from Jim’s mother, supposedly because the late Mr. Hawkins owed him money. And well into the voyage, he announces that Jim and Dr. Livesey aren’t going to get shares of the treasure after all, just a salary. Squire Trelawney, in fact, is just like Captain Flint at the core, a man who has more force at his disposal and uses it to take what he wants. It’s just that in Trelawney’s case, this force isn’t always him pointing a gun at you right this moment. More often, it’s that he and his buddies make and enforce the laws, and usually they don’t even have to call out a whole bunch of guys with guns to make you comply because you already know it’s hopeless.
Little details throughout emphasize how this system of surviving and/or getting ahead by hurting others pervades their society from top to bottom. Jim and his mother are almost victims of Pew, but Jim pushes Pew in front of oncoming horses which trample Pew to death because Pew is blind and can’t see to get out of the way, making Jim both victim and victimizer. (It’s a horrifying moment, staged so that you feel even vicious pirates don’t deserve such a death.) Silver talks about how once he gets his share of the treasure, he and his wife will wear fine clothes and ride in carriages like a gentleman and lady. And why not? Aren’t any nobles with Norman ancestry just the descendants of Vikings who made good? So why can’t Silver found his own noble line the same way? Israel Hands mentions that he was press-ganged at Jim’s age - he’s a vicious man, but who taught him how? The official national navy. Silver’s wife is given a name (Alibe) and a backstory (the book just mentions, “oh, she’s not white and he trusts her to run the inn, the end”): she’s a former prostitute Silver met in Puerto Rico, and she has had enough of being on the bottom of the heap and will do what it takes to get a better life. She first goes to the Admiral Benbow to stay out of sight for a while, rubbing her feet with gravel until they bleed just before she gets there to make sure Mrs. Hawkins is sympathetic to her, and promptly raids the jewelry box. And Jim has a speech in which he admits to almost joining the pirates, because he didn’t see any difference between them and Trelawney and he feared for his life around Trelawney. If they’re all brutes, why not side with the winning brutes?
Captain Smollett shows the difficulty of trying to be decent in this world. He’s caught between the pirates and the rulers, and can’t make anyone happy. He treats the sailors like people instead of abused work animals, despite his misgivings about them; when they arrive at the island, he wants to give them some time off and a drink, while Trelawney wants to push on because he’s an important man and paying for all this and he wants it now. Smollett obviously dislikes Trelawney as much as Trelawney dislikes him, and disagrees with Trelawney’s high-handed style. On the other hand, he doesn’t sympathize with the mutineers no matter how bad Trelawney is, and insists that Silver be taken back for a trial, when Jim and Dr. Livesey are more inclined to go easy on him because he did save their lives in the end. On the one hand, it seems like if everyone just listened to Smollett and tried things his way, they could all get better deals in life without the violence - a Trelawney who acted like Smollett instead of his father would certainly be an improvement. On the other hand, he’s still helping prop up the Trelawneys of the world, and making things a little nicer might just defuse the justified anger at the Trelawneys and keep anyone from rocking the boat too much when it obviously needs to be rocked.
Quite understandably, it’s hard to resolve this sort of conflict in a neat, cinematic way. Ben Gunn, rather than coming back with them and spending all his money, stays on the island because he decides human society is just too awful. Jim throws most of the treasure overboard because it has caused so much bloodshed, and Trelawney drowns trying to dive after it. After they’re kicked out of the inn, Alibe and Mrs. Hawkins team up (even fighting off Black Dog together), Alibe gives back the jewelry, and they find work together in the city in a kitchen. Jim, rather than Ben Gunn, lets Silver go free - right after Silver, thinking he’s going to be hanged, gives Jim a message for Alibe and a bag of gold he swiped from the hoard before Jim tossed it. They have a charming interchange in which Jim promises to look after the parrot until Silver can come back for him, and they agree that if Jim ever wants advice... well, he should probably find somebody else, but he can always come to Silver for adventure!
I think I see what they were aiming at: instead of everyone stomping on each other to get to the top, they should start working together. Then they can end up better off than if they just obeyed and imitated their rulers. Fight The Man by not fighting each other, and all. But the movie doesn’t really show how that could actually work. Will rejecting a pile of loot mean Jim and his mother will find some way to stick it to the system and live without money? Is Jim busting Silver out of the brig going to make the legal system any less a stacked deck? Is a brief alliance between Alibe and Mrs. Hawkins going to end the (legal) exploitation of oppressed classes? Maybe you could see it as small cracks in the rotten system, but there doesn’t seem to be a long view here, just these particular characters escaping tragedy this time.
Which might be fine - a few people carving out a safe niche for themselves in a rotten world is a perfectly good story - except for that sack of coins. Jim and his mother would have been pretty broke, because I doubt Trelawney’s will gives their inn back to them rather than to whatever cousin inherits his stuff. But because Silver gave him that sack of coins, Jim gets to make the dramatic gesture of rejecting blood money and still get some of it anyway. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! And then you start thinking that Silver and Alibe get to be damaged enough by systemic societal violence to murder perfectly nice young sailors who won’t join a mutiny but promise not to interfere, and steal poor widows’ few possessions, but still nice enough to truly make friends with and help the people they were intending to stab in the back. That’s quite a convenient balance - one which lets the audience like Silver rather than just enjoy him as an ambiguously sympathetic but still frightening character, and allows Jim to like him too. And the horrifying ordeal of their voyage, portrayed as a very bad thing throughout, is abruptly made light of as an adventure. Wasn’t Silver planning to quit adventuring because it’s actually awful and he wants a quiet, comfortable life for once? And where’s Jim’s trauma? He’s practically chipper at the end.
Despite my misgivings about the ending (and Mrs. Hawkins’s voice - you know Moaning Myrtle? yeah, it’s her - and the weird decision to have Ben Gunn as played by Elijah Wood done up in some kind of pseudo-Native American warpaint or whatever that was supposed to be - seriously, what?), I really enjoyed this adaptation. It was fun to watch, and has a lot of chewy themes to analyze.
Post script: The actress who plays Alibe Silver has a nifty interview up here: http://badwilf.co.uk/?p=2870. Quote: “It’s such a brilliant story because the whole world is there: you’ve got the people who are at the top of the pecking order still grabbing and reaching for anything that they possibly can and so is everybody right at the bottom.” Also, commentary on who speaking parts are written for! “Most of my career has been working with men! That’s the lot of the female actor [...]”
The recent Treasure Island two-part miniseries captures this almost perfectly. Almost.
There’s a lot to like about this adaptation. The visuals are lovely (save an occasional jerky camera trick which didn’t work for me). The casting director got the memo that sailing crews picked up sailors from all over the place, so a fair number of the characters are Spanish, black (including Billy Bones and Mr. Arrow), Chinese, or Indian. Eddie Izzard is a delightful Long John Silver, turning from a very persuasive upstanding tavernkeeper persona to chillingly callous on a dime, and of course he has some excellent funny bits. He’s also a key component in the movie’s themes of systemic societal violence. However, his role in the end, I thought, had mixed results for his character development and the movie as a whole.
Silver is a tricky character in adaptations, because he’s so interesting and engaging that it’s tempting to have the other characters end up on his side. That old adaptation from 1950 or so had one of the characters exclaim, as they watched him make his escape, something along the lines of, “You know, I hope he makes it!” But in the book, Jim has PTSD nightmares involving Silver’s parrot, and it’s highly possible that Silver is a stone-cold sociopath. Jim does comment that it is to be hoped that Silver is living comfortably with his wife somewhere, because he’s almost certainly going to hell later, but that’s hardly becoming buddies.
The most interesting thing about the movie is the way it makes all the pirates, not just Silver, a little more sympathetic even when they’re unredeemably vicious by the time we meet them. A movie in which you don’t have to be an innocent victim to be a victim - that’s not something I see too often!
The book doesn’t give a lot of context for the pirates. They’re bad, they’re violent, they’re greedy, so of course a life of piracy appeals to them, right? Oh, some may have fallen into it and been corrupted - Ben Gunn, maybe - but if you’re a good kid like Jim, you can resist.
The movie takes this further by asking what kind of society these pirates are from. The prologue segment with the pirates sets it up: Flint informs Silver and most of his crew that he isn’t going to give them their shares of the treasure after all, and Silver and some others escape in one of the boats while Flint’s loyalists shoot cannon balls at them (which loses Silver his leg, rather than the muddled and possibly untrue story he tells in the book, and I might have the details mixed up but I think Pew is blinded here as well). The payoff starts once Squire Trelawney is introduced. In the book, he’s a well-meaning fool whose one useful skill is that he’s an excellent shot, presumably because as a rich landowner he has time to practice. In the movie, he’s a much harder man. He mentions his father’s Navy service several times, with particular emphasis on how you have to maintain discipline onboard - and then demonstrates his idea of discipline when Mr. Arrow, instead of falling overboard in a storm while drunk as in the book, punches Trelawney while drunk and Trelawney has him keel-hauled, which kills Arrow. He leaves Redruth behind to seize the Admiral Benbow Inn from Jim’s mother, supposedly because the late Mr. Hawkins owed him money. And well into the voyage, he announces that Jim and Dr. Livesey aren’t going to get shares of the treasure after all, just a salary. Squire Trelawney, in fact, is just like Captain Flint at the core, a man who has more force at his disposal and uses it to take what he wants. It’s just that in Trelawney’s case, this force isn’t always him pointing a gun at you right this moment. More often, it’s that he and his buddies make and enforce the laws, and usually they don’t even have to call out a whole bunch of guys with guns to make you comply because you already know it’s hopeless.
Little details throughout emphasize how this system of surviving and/or getting ahead by hurting others pervades their society from top to bottom. Jim and his mother are almost victims of Pew, but Jim pushes Pew in front of oncoming horses which trample Pew to death because Pew is blind and can’t see to get out of the way, making Jim both victim and victimizer. (It’s a horrifying moment, staged so that you feel even vicious pirates don’t deserve such a death.) Silver talks about how once he gets his share of the treasure, he and his wife will wear fine clothes and ride in carriages like a gentleman and lady. And why not? Aren’t any nobles with Norman ancestry just the descendants of Vikings who made good? So why can’t Silver found his own noble line the same way? Israel Hands mentions that he was press-ganged at Jim’s age - he’s a vicious man, but who taught him how? The official national navy. Silver’s wife is given a name (Alibe) and a backstory (the book just mentions, “oh, she’s not white and he trusts her to run the inn, the end”): she’s a former prostitute Silver met in Puerto Rico, and she has had enough of being on the bottom of the heap and will do what it takes to get a better life. She first goes to the Admiral Benbow to stay out of sight for a while, rubbing her feet with gravel until they bleed just before she gets there to make sure Mrs. Hawkins is sympathetic to her, and promptly raids the jewelry box. And Jim has a speech in which he admits to almost joining the pirates, because he didn’t see any difference between them and Trelawney and he feared for his life around Trelawney. If they’re all brutes, why not side with the winning brutes?
Captain Smollett shows the difficulty of trying to be decent in this world. He’s caught between the pirates and the rulers, and can’t make anyone happy. He treats the sailors like people instead of abused work animals, despite his misgivings about them; when they arrive at the island, he wants to give them some time off and a drink, while Trelawney wants to push on because he’s an important man and paying for all this and he wants it now. Smollett obviously dislikes Trelawney as much as Trelawney dislikes him, and disagrees with Trelawney’s high-handed style. On the other hand, he doesn’t sympathize with the mutineers no matter how bad Trelawney is, and insists that Silver be taken back for a trial, when Jim and Dr. Livesey are more inclined to go easy on him because he did save their lives in the end. On the one hand, it seems like if everyone just listened to Smollett and tried things his way, they could all get better deals in life without the violence - a Trelawney who acted like Smollett instead of his father would certainly be an improvement. On the other hand, he’s still helping prop up the Trelawneys of the world, and making things a little nicer might just defuse the justified anger at the Trelawneys and keep anyone from rocking the boat too much when it obviously needs to be rocked.
Quite understandably, it’s hard to resolve this sort of conflict in a neat, cinematic way. Ben Gunn, rather than coming back with them and spending all his money, stays on the island because he decides human society is just too awful. Jim throws most of the treasure overboard because it has caused so much bloodshed, and Trelawney drowns trying to dive after it. After they’re kicked out of the inn, Alibe and Mrs. Hawkins team up (even fighting off Black Dog together), Alibe gives back the jewelry, and they find work together in the city in a kitchen. Jim, rather than Ben Gunn, lets Silver go free - right after Silver, thinking he’s going to be hanged, gives Jim a message for Alibe and a bag of gold he swiped from the hoard before Jim tossed it. They have a charming interchange in which Jim promises to look after the parrot until Silver can come back for him, and they agree that if Jim ever wants advice... well, he should probably find somebody else, but he can always come to Silver for adventure!
I think I see what they were aiming at: instead of everyone stomping on each other to get to the top, they should start working together. Then they can end up better off than if they just obeyed and imitated their rulers. Fight The Man by not fighting each other, and all. But the movie doesn’t really show how that could actually work. Will rejecting a pile of loot mean Jim and his mother will find some way to stick it to the system and live without money? Is Jim busting Silver out of the brig going to make the legal system any less a stacked deck? Is a brief alliance between Alibe and Mrs. Hawkins going to end the (legal) exploitation of oppressed classes? Maybe you could see it as small cracks in the rotten system, but there doesn’t seem to be a long view here, just these particular characters escaping tragedy this time.
Which might be fine - a few people carving out a safe niche for themselves in a rotten world is a perfectly good story - except for that sack of coins. Jim and his mother would have been pretty broke, because I doubt Trelawney’s will gives their inn back to them rather than to whatever cousin inherits his stuff. But because Silver gave him that sack of coins, Jim gets to make the dramatic gesture of rejecting blood money and still get some of it anyway. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! And then you start thinking that Silver and Alibe get to be damaged enough by systemic societal violence to murder perfectly nice young sailors who won’t join a mutiny but promise not to interfere, and steal poor widows’ few possessions, but still nice enough to truly make friends with and help the people they were intending to stab in the back. That’s quite a convenient balance - one which lets the audience like Silver rather than just enjoy him as an ambiguously sympathetic but still frightening character, and allows Jim to like him too. And the horrifying ordeal of their voyage, portrayed as a very bad thing throughout, is abruptly made light of as an adventure. Wasn’t Silver planning to quit adventuring because it’s actually awful and he wants a quiet, comfortable life for once? And where’s Jim’s trauma? He’s practically chipper at the end.
Despite my misgivings about the ending (and Mrs. Hawkins’s voice - you know Moaning Myrtle? yeah, it’s her - and the weird decision to have Ben Gunn as played by Elijah Wood done up in some kind of pseudo-Native American warpaint or whatever that was supposed to be - seriously, what?), I really enjoyed this adaptation. It was fun to watch, and has a lot of chewy themes to analyze.
Post script: The actress who plays Alibe Silver has a nifty interview up here: http://badwilf.co.uk/?p=2870. Quote: “It’s such a brilliant story because the whole world is there: you’ve got the people who are at the top of the pecking order still grabbing and reaching for anything that they possibly can and so is everybody right at the bottom.” Also, commentary on who speaking parts are written for! “Most of my career has been working with men! That’s the lot of the female actor [...]”