Teresa Reviews “Halloween Party” (2010)

Teresa reviews “Halloween Party” (2010) and thought Mark Gatiss did an excellent job backing up the 78-year-old Christie.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.

Fidelity to text: 4 drownings

The plot’s simplified, but also improved. No loose ends here!

Quality of movie on its own: 4½ drownings

Creepy, atmospheric, wonderfully acted, but a few minutes too short.

Agatha was 78 when she published Halloween Party in 1969 and it shows. It’s got a wonderfully clever setup. She even tells you who the murderer has got to be (if you consider the ramifications of shoving a 12-year-old face-first into a bucket of water) yet it also needed at least one more rewrite along with some serious editing. Too many plot threads are brought out and then left dangling free. There are too many duplicate phrases where you can see she was trying to decide which was the better way to express her thought.

Mark Gatiss did a wonderful rewrite. He wove in loose plot threads, deleted extra characters, added some with better motivations, and turned what could have been a mess into an excellent movie.

He was helped – no question! – by stellar performances, great music, atmospheric set dressing, and a fabulous, wonderful, glorious garden portraying Michael Garfield’s quarry garden suitable for gods to walk through.

The garden, a private one, is Beckley Park. It’s not a quarry garden, stepping down into what was once a vast, industrial stone pit. It’s beautifully clipped topiary. You should especially notice the dragon teeth hedge, echoing the snap-dragon the kids carefully but eagerly devour at the fateful Halloween party.

If you’re unfamiliar with topiary, it’s the art of pruning yew or boxwood into shapes and then – this is the hard part – maintaining those shapes while the shrubs continue to grow. Topiary needs to be clipped faithfully while not killing the shrubs. Think of it as English tree-torture, like bonsai is Japanese tree-torture, and espalier is French tree-torture. Nothing in nature will grow into these shapes but a skilled and patient gardener can bend nature to his will.

Gardening at this level is art. Unlike, say a painting or a symphony, this art exists in four dimensions, in space as well as time. A painting is finished. Having a mind of its own, a garden never finishes. It’s always growing and changing. It always needs maintenance. It transforms from season to season so what you see in May is not what you see in October; July is not January. A gardener must accommodate the location, the planting zone, sun, prevailing winds, expected rainfall. The gardener must cope with insects, blight, animals, and homeowners’ associations who don’t appreciate what the gardener is trying to do.

Topiary gardens add an additional layer of complexity. Annuals are replanted each year. Perennial flowers and grasses take only a few years to maturity. Topiary takes decades to reach the point the artist envisioned (if it ever does). Once reached, expect faithful, dedicated, highly-skilled trimming to keep the shrubs at their peak.

Do you wonder why Michael Garfield is obsessed? He has to be obsessed with beauty and control just to keep up with those recalcitrant, demanding plants! Most gardeners have some obsession because only our obsession keeps us going; reading deceitful nursery catalogs, dreaming and planning and weeding, instead of turning the entire garden over to grass which is, frankly, much easier.

But a lawn isn’t beautiful like a garden filled with beautifully shaped hedges and spilling over with flowers, morphing with the seasons. A mowed lawn’s purpose is to serve as a backdrop to the perennial border and the spring bulbs.

I’m not saying I approve of Michael Garfield’s behavior. Murder, even when you compost the bodies afterwards to feed the soil to make the best, most ethereal garden soil possible that will grow anything you want, even Himalayan Blue Poppies, is still murder.

But I can understand the obsession of the true artist who sublimates everything to his art, who willingly sacrifices his own flesh and blood because what else matters but the garden?

Miranda is an interesting character. She’s fey and she lives in a world of her own imagination.

Perhaps too subtly, film and novel showed that she’s credulous. She believes what she wants to believe and since she doesn’t lie and have ulterior motives, she doesn’t think other people lie and have ulterior motives. I base this on her reaction to Joyce. Everyone else rolls their eyes at Joyce’s wild stories. No one believes Joyce because she’s been proved a liar too many times. Even the vicar dismisses Joyce, particularly her story about discovering the wonders of India.

In novel and film, Miranda believes Joyce.

She and Joyce are friends. They tell each other their secrets. I’ll agree Miranda should have showed more emotion about Joyce’s tragic death. On the other hand, Michael Garfield’s been feeding her lies for years. Who’s to say that Miranda doesn’t believe that Joyce has passed into a far more exciting, magical, and wonderful world? The same world that Miranda wants so badly to be a part of. The world where the plants and birds talk to her and she’s more than a passive observer.

Would Miranda have drunk the poison to atone for Joyce’s death and to enter that magical realm on the other side of the garden? You bet she would.

I don’t expect a girl on the cusp of adolescence to be wary or smart. Miranda’s mother, Judith, should have known better but then we wouldn’t have a plot. She had the affair with Michael, then fled, hoping to never see him again. She realized he was a dangerous, obsessive, fallen archangel. So why, when Michael Garfield showed up in her safely anonymous village where no one she knew would ever find her, didn’t she leave?

This is where a few extra minutes of dialog would have explained why Judith didn’t pack up her daughter and head for the hills. It would have especially explained why Judith didn’t warn Miranda away from Michael. Judith didn’t think Michael could count? That he’d believe her story about a brief marriage and quick widowhood? Maybe she’s where Miranda gets her credulousness from.

I wanted a few extra minutes with Rowena Drake, to see why she was so obsessed with Michael Garfield. I wanted a few minutes to see what her adult children thought when they learned that mom not only was having a torrid affair with the gardener, but that she’d plotted with him to murder dad, the au pair, the forging solicitor, their great aunt, and two kids.

Another fascination with the film was the snap-dragon. Letting your kids play with alcohol-soaked, blazing raisins went out of fashion decades ago. Imagine the lawsuits over burned mouths and fingers if you served up a snap-dragon at your kid’s birthday party. Mark Gatiss didn’t make up the chant. He cribbed it from Robert Chambers Book of Days (1879):

Here he comes with flaming bowl,
Don’t he mean to take his toll,
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

Take care you don’t take too much,
Be not greedy in your clutch,
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

With his blue and lapping tongue
Many of you will be stung,
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

Words of wisdom for us to heed. Michael the Archangel slew the dragon. Michael Garfield was a dragon in human form: obsessive, a slave to beauty, and beyond petty mortal concerns.