Teresa Reviews “Nemesis” (2007): Geraldine McEwan’s Puzzling Swan Song

Fidelity to text: 1 and 1/2 poison bottles.
If you’re familiar with the novel, you’ll be aghast at what ITV Productions did to the story line. About all that remains is Verity herself, her tragic life, and Jason Rafiel’s enjoyment of manipulating people. Oh, and the coach tour of the great houses of England. That’s still present.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 and 1/2 poison bottles.
I never know what to expect from ITV: excellent or terrible. In this instance, I got both. Despite the screenwriter playing fast and loose to earn his salary, the movie worked for me, right up until the third act. Then it completely fell apart into an incoherent, illogical mess. The final scene was the rotten cherry atop the rancid sundae.

I liked the first two-thirds of this film. I really did. Introducing a ’50s version of Mission Impossible was a nifty touch. Jason Rafiel sends his last request to Miss Marple via a record on a gramophone. If she cooperates, she’ll win the £500 bequest. In the novel, the bequest is considerably larger but Jason Rafiel is considerably richer. Here, he’s apparently a “man of letters” and noted philanthropist. As a “man of letters”, he must not be very rich or else he spent all his wealth arranging the tour.

The tour had a definite And Then There Were None vibe. In the novel, some members of the tour group were sent by Jason Rafiel, but not all. Here, every single person including the tour guide is in on the plot. As you would expect, the bodies start to pile up with the least guilty dying first while Miss Marple unravels the clues about Verity along with figuring out how everyone is related to everyone else.

We’ll start with Michael Rafiel. He’s still Jason Rafiel’s son but with a different last name. He’s also a Luftwaffe pilot, shot down over England after Dunkirk, which is how he meets Verity. Who’s a novice nun. She nurses him back to health and naturally, they fall in love. The sisters of St. Elspeth, Clothilde in particular, are not happy about Verity running off to Ireland with an enemy combatant and tell her so. Verity disappears under mysterious circumstances and Michael gets picked up by the police and spends the rest of the war in a POW camp. He begs his father (a resident alien living in London) to find Verity. Dear old dad refuses and the estrangement begins.

Clothilde is still present, in vastly different form. She’s become a nun at the St. Elspeth convent. We meet her and her Mother Superior, Sister Agnes. A generous, anonymous benefactor provides them with two tickets for the all-expense tour. Naturally, they drop their religious duties in London and race off to see England.

No one else from the novel remains. Even the tour guide gets a character revamp. Raymond West (Richard E. Grant) appears from out of thin air. He’s Miss Marple’s writing nephew so when Jason Rafiel tells Miss Marple she needs a companion, she chooses him. We get some great scenes with Richard E. Grant chewing the scenery and chasing after everyone in a skirt. I don’t remember that predilection from the novels but here we are.

But all the changes worked, until they didn’t. The other tour group members were distinctive, interesting, and had logical if sometimes farfetched ties to Verity. Until they didn’t, when we discover multiple cases of mistaken identities, misidentified wounded soldiers with apparently blind wives, lying lawyers, and tour guides who were intelligence operatives during the war despite not looking nearly old enough.

That was something else I kept noticing. The ages of the actors were wrong. If you’re twenty-two, you have a certain dewiness about you that isn’t present when you’re thirty-two. The action takes place both in 1940 and in 1951, yet none of the protagonists have aged a day. They looked either too young for their part or too old.

But okay. It’s Hollywood.

Then the tour bus gets sabotaged and we get to spend the night in the abandoned St. Elspeth convent. An awful lot of furniture and religious statuary were left behind when the convent was abandoned. I had a hard time accepting that all those icons would be left to rot. I suppose it was the same set of movers who conveniently left behind hundreds of candles and lanterns to light the convent so our heroes can dash about in the dark. There’s a scene where, despite no one having been inside the convent in years, lit candles are scattered all around. Who did that? No explanation.

Then the climax and one ridiculous scene after another. Verity reappearing in her nun’s habit. Where did those clothes come from? The stocks of poisoned cocoa when the convent kitchen has been left empty for years. Why does anyone cart poisons around with them? Yet apparently, one of the characters does just that. And how about impaling yourself on a spear? No one dies that quick. Poisoned cocoa would kill much faster. A spear, plunged through the abdomen, would take hours unless you hit a major artery and bleed out. Since amateurs are not surgeons, the odds are much better that the victim will die of sepsis after hours to days of agony. That’s certainly enough time to get the victim to a doctor.

And of course, our wounded soldier discovers his true identity, recovers some of his lost memory, and meets his grieving — for eleven years — widow. But we don’t get any dialog! Nothing. Not a faint, not a scream, not even “I never forgot you even when I thought I was someone else.” The screen fades to black as though the scriptwriter had used up all his imagination in adding gramophones with the voice of Jason Rafiel directing the action from beyond the grave.

Jason Rafiel is one manipulative jerk, pulling everyone’s strings like a master puppeteer. He has zero empathy for anyone else — including his own son — so it’s not a surprise that he doesn’t care what his little plot does to the unfortunate puppets. I suppose that’s what comes of being a “man of letters”. You stop thinking of people as people. They turn into characters whom you manipulate to suit the needs of the plot.

Then we come to the final scene. Nemesis was Geraldine McEwan’s final turn as Miss Marple for ITV Productions. All future episodes have Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple so one would assume that ITV wanted to give Geraldine McEwan a proper sendoff.

Instead, we get Miss Marple cutting a rose and pricking her finger and bleeding. She stares at her hand and then at the camera. Her expression indicates that she’s just realized what a terrible, awful mistake she’s made. Not signing the contract for another season? Or that she was completely wrong about who actually murdered Verity and two other people? Or that she was wrong about who the true murderer was in all the other cases she solved?

We’ll never know.

What I do know is you should watch Joan Hickson’s version of Nemesis from 1987 instead of this one if you like a coherent plot. That version changed things around too, especially Michael Rafiel’s part, but it was much truer to the novel than this mess.

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