Teresa Reviews “Elephants Can Remember” (2013)
Teresa reviews “Elephants Can Remember” (2013) and discovered the screenwriter knew how to salvage a good adaptation from a sad novel.
Fidelity to text: 3 revolvers
Add a loony headshrinker, his murder, and the daughter of one of his victims but it slotted in nicely.
Quality of movie on its own: 4 revolvers
The two separate plots tied up effectively, although a few more clues along the way would have helped.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.
Elephants Can Remember (1972) is the next to last book Agatha wrote, followed by the worse and sadder Postern of Fate in 1973. Curtain and Sleeping Murder, although published afterwards, were actually written during WWII, as a nest egg for her family in case she died during the German bombing of London.
The last novels demonstrate that Agatha’s writing abilities were failing. The seed of a good novel is buried inside Elephants but even the best editing, which the novel didn’t receive, wouldn’t have brought it out. It’s repetitious, with plot threads dangling loose everywhere. Ariadne interviews elderly people, then repeats the conversation to Poirot. Not much happens and you won’t care about any of the people involved.
A faithful retelling of the novel in film would have been dire; an exercise in stasis and tedium. Lucky for us, Nick Dear’s script fixed the faults and tied in some of those unwoven threads.
The major change is adding the fate of Dorothea Preston-Gray Jarrow’s daughter. Dorothea is Margaret’s twin sister. The novel calls them Dolly and Molly, something the film dispensed with although that added to the confusion as to who an elephant was remembering. The novel mentions Dorothea’s daughter and son. She murdered the son, a toddler, and blamed the crime on her daughter. Dorothea also murdered at least one other child, and injured or tried to injure several other children, including that of her twin sister, Margaret. Dorothea was always jealous of Margaret.
But what happened to Dorothea’s daughter? She vanishes, not even getting a name. She deserved to have her story told. She was a child accused of murder, the accusation hushed up when horrified family members and authorities learn it was mom all along. The child was hustled off to boarding schools, rarely seeing mom and never learning the truth about what mom said and did. Dad’s dead and so is baby brother and the rest of the relatives turn their back on her. Sometimes, daughter is reunited with mom, when she’s well enough to leave the snake pit asylums she’s trapped in. When mom’s in the snake pit, enduring horror after horror, she writes to daughter, filling her with dreadful stories of torture disguised as therapy and how it’s all for her own good despite her agonized protests and asking why did her sister abandon her.
Then it happens. A reunion between daughter and mom, at mom’s sister’s home. Except the day daughter arrives, tragedy happens again. Mom shoves twin sister over the cliff and daughter overhears only part of the resulting agonized conversation afterwards: the part where uncle plots with the au pair to murder mom. Subsequently, daughter is hustled off to Canada on the very next transport, never to learn anything further, including the truth of what happened.
What is that girl, all growed up now, to think? No one — in an effort to spare her feelings no doubt — sat her down and told her the despairing truth, unsparing of the gruesome details. Instead, she had to come up with a story of her own.
Which brings me to the film. Films need action, so why not play up the agonized journey of Dorothea’s lost daughter, desperate to avenge mom? And here we are. Daughter gets a name, Mary Jarrow, and a mission to exact retribution on everyone who wronged mom, starting with the sadistic alienist who waterboarded her and claimed it was for her own good.
Dr. Willoughby, the son of Professor Willoughby and current head of the Institute, no longer uses hydrotherapy on his loony patients. He doesn’t believe forcibly submerging patients for hours or days in a bathtub or spraying them with a firehose works. Hot or cold, water treatment doesn’t treat mental illness. Making the water colder or hotter to discipline unruly patients doesn’t help.
For his part, Dr. Willoughby was thrilled to hire a young woman from Canada who was not only a good office worker (willing to work cheap!), but willing to be his mistress. This is, after all, why he maintains an apartment at the Institute. Yes, it’s convenient when he works late and can’t go home to the wife and kiddies but that’s not all the flat is useful for. Pay close attention when Dr. Willoughby admits to Poirot that he doesn’t have patient records for Desmond Burton-Cox. Why doesn’t he? Because Mrs. Burton-Cox was poor (or so she claimed) and paid with sex. She probably stared at the same bedroom ceiling that Mary did.
Just like Mary Jarrow might have a touch of her mother’s madness, Dr. Willoughby has his father’s lack of ethics and morals.
You can almost grasp Mary’s point of view, looking at the story from her side of the looking glass. And, naturally, since her hated aunt and uncle, who could have saved mom, are dead, she has to wreak vengeance on the survivors: Celia and her fiancé, Desmond. Why should they get their happy ending? Mary the innocent victim didn’t get hers.
That’s where your sympathy will end. You might be able to make a case for Mary murdering Professor Willoughby and escaping the hangman afterwards to spend the rest of her life at Broadmoor Asylum, but trying to strangle Desmond? That’s a bathtub too far. It’s also idiotic, because he’s far stronger than she is, even when taken by surprise. She was lucky to escape. Her attempted murder of Celia suggests that Mary inherited at least some of her mother’s murderous tendencies. Celia never harmed her, any more than the children who her mom murdered caused harm.
Like Celia, Mary deserved the truth. But unlike Celia, who apparently was not ostracized by relatives and exiled to Canada, no one took in poor Mary and told her what really happened.
This added backstory hugely enhanced the film. Motivation, tension, drama, high stakes, and misguided revenge. They’re all here, turning a short story padded into a novel into a worthwhile movie.
And there’s still more! Ariadne interviewing elephants and proving to Poirot why he should pay attention to her intuition. Mrs. Burton-Cox buttonholing Ariadne to ask impertinent questions, showing the perils to authors of speaking in public. Concert pianists and the horrors of the past and, most of all, how old sins have long shadows.
The past is never past, not as long as someone remembers. And people, as Ariadne noted, have as good a memory as elephants.
