Teresa Reviews “They Do It With Mirrors” (2009): Novel Rehabilitation

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Fidelity to text: 2 and 1/2 knives.

Plenty of changes, the most egregious being rewriting Carrie Louise’s personality and philanthropism and changing Lewis Serrocold’s motives. Other characters disappear altogether, get combined, or are raised from the dead (Carrie Louise’s husband #2). The first murder weapon changes too.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 and 1/2 knives.

But I didn’t care about the changes until the ending! That was when I couldn’t accept the murderer’s motivations. I also didn’t like how Wally and Gina were handled. I had even less reason to accept their glorious reunion than I did in the 1991 Joan Hickson adaptation. I very much appreciated that this version, unlike the 1991 film, did not shoehorn in five minutes of bizarre avant-garde modern dance with accompanying atonal music that had nothing to do with the plot.

Let’s start with the actress you all want to start with. I loved Joan Collins as Ruth van Rydock, Carrie Louise’s sister. She gets top billing although she doesn’t have, sadly, much screen time. When she does, you can tell who the star is. You can also understand why, as Miss Marple says, Ruth and Carrie Louise have a great relationship as sisters as long as there’s an ocean between them. Joan is perfect as the glamour queen whereas Penelope Wilton is equally perfect as her dowdy younger sister.

Carrie Louise is the main focus of the movie, as she is in the novel. In the novel, however, she’s more acted upon. Here, she’s the one who wants to reform criminals and spends all her wealth to do so. It’s not husband #3, Lewis Serrocold. Instead, he becomes the ever-supportive, adoring spouse who wants everything to be perfect for his beloved. And I do mean Everything with a capital E. He’s also jealous of husband #2 (Johnny Restarick) who shows up unannounced and expecting to move in. There are some funny scenes between the two husbands, present and former.

Carrie Louise comes across as the kind of altruistic do-gooder that you want to avoid. She is so sure she’s right that she doesn’t care or even notice when her notions are hurting the people around her or aren’t working at all. In the case of the convicts she’s reforming, well, some of them might benefit. At a minimum, they’re getting a second chance out in the sunshine and fresh air. Stonygates is far more pleasant than Dartmoor prison although the food may not be.

Make sure you notice the reworking of Dante over Stonygates’ main entrance: Recover Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. It’s a very nice rephrasing but the gate with its sign kept making me think of the sign for Auschwitz. You recall the one: Work Makes You Free.

Where Carrie Louise’s blindness really shows up is in how she treats her daughters.

Adopted daughter Gina is lovely, vivacious, and fun and, based on the flashback, she’s always been that way. Natural daughter Mildred, a few years younger than Gina, is seen in the same flashback as plain, shy, wearing glasses — dowdy alert! — and nowhere near as sparkling. What mother wouldn’t be more invested in the livelier, more charming daughter? Even better, Carrie Louise has the perfect reason to openly and obviously favor Gina. Since Gina’s adopted, she needs more love and attention. Mildred, nerdy and dull, is ignored. It’s a very sharp observation of the flaws in Carrie Louise’s worldview. She doesn’t pay much attention to reality and the real needs of messy people unless it suits her. If it doesn’t suit her, she’ll find a reason to discount them.

You’ll observe the same dynamic between Carrie Louise and Wally, Gina’s husband. He doesn’t fit in either, he’s openly unhappy, but since he’s not a project like one of her convicts, he doesn’t matter one bit.

Nor does Carrie Louise notice the weird and creepy byplay between Gina and Stephen Restarick. Stephen is Carrie Louise’s stepson from husband #2. Since Gina’s adopted and Stephen has a different mother as well as father, they’re completely unrelated genetically. Nonetheless, the implication is that they’ve grown up together as brother and sister, even if only part-time. It’s off-putting how they flirt and right in front of Gina’s husband, Wally, too. Yet since Carrie Louise doesn’t see anything wrong with this picture, neither does anyone else.

The novel handles Gina and Wally much better than either adaptation. I could not understand why Gina chose Wally in the end when it’s so obvious she’s no longer attracted to him. And why should she be? He’s sullen, sulky, ignores her, and doesn’t punch out Stephen Restarick’s lights for pawing at his wife.

Because Carrie Louise takes over the running of the reform school, all of Lewis Serrocold’s motivations get twisted beyond recognition. It doesn’t work nearly as well as the novel did. Altruistic reasons for what he did? Really? This would make things better for Carrie Louise and her convict rehabilitation project? For a supposedly intelligent man, he’s stupid. Thirty seconds of thought would demonstrate the flaws in his plan.

This reads like I didn’t like the film, but I did. It was well-paced, well-acted, looked fabulous (that house!) and showed a very good understanding of the dynamics between sisters. Mildred is so jealous of Gina and it’s understandable. She’s spent her entire life in the shadow of her older, more glamorous sister. That’s why Mildred makes sure Gina sees the old newspaper with the story of her birth-mother’s execution for arsenic poisoning. What I would have liked was an explanation for where Gina got the wig and dress. Did Mildred supply them?

There were so many great scenes, many of them quite funny. I was really enjoying the movie.

Then the ending fell apart. Edgar Lawson’s dramatic flight into the lake didn’t make sense. We needed more screen time to explain why he thought that was a good idea. We needed more screen time to explain why Lewis Serrocold panicked and ran after Edgar. Remember, the convict rehabilitation scheme wasn’t his idea. It was Carrie Louise’s. His single goal in life was to support her in whatever she chose to do. Then he abandons her to the long arm of the law to chase after some psycho teenager who threatened him with a pistol?

It made even less sense when Gina decided to ignore the man she married for the stepbrother she’d been hanging off of (to his great enjoyment) throughout the entire movie. There was a sort of reconciliation between Mildred and Carrie Louise but it was so truncated, it might as well have not been there. Carrie Louise needed to have the scales fall from her eyes but it didn’t quite happen. I didn’t get the reconciliation I would have liked between Mildred and Gina either. It wasn’t either girl’s fault that mom played favorites.

A tighter climax would have made this a far better film. Even so, despite the changes inflicted on the novel, it’s pretty darn good. It’s much better than the Joan Hickson version. I’m looking forward even more now to watching Helen Hayes’ 1985 version Murder With Mirrors. The same novel, filmed three different ways. It’s fascinating to see what’s changed and if it worked.

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