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REVIEW: TVNZ’s latest lavish 18th Century-set British tale has a lot to live up to.
Not only is the four-part Tom Jones (which debuts on TVNZ 1 on Saturday, May 20 at 8.55pm) based on Henry Fielding’s classic 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, but there have already been two highly regarded and hugely successful adaptations of the source material.
An Albert Finney-starring big-screen version in 1963 took home four Oscars (and inspired a Welsh singer born Thomas John Woodward to change his name), while the five-part, 1997 BBC production featured a star-studded cast that included two Tardis inhabitants (Sylvester McCoy and Peter Capaldi), Brian Blessed, Samantha Morton and Max Beesley in the title role.
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This time around, it’s The Rising’s Solly McLeod stepping into the breeches of the “fatherless nobody” raised in the comfortable surroundings of Paradise Hall by Squire John Allworthy (James Fleet).
Despite having grown accustomed to a lonely bed after the losses of his wife and infant children, the Squire was determined to keep the baby found abandoned in his chamber, despite the protests of his sister Bridget (Felicity Montagu).
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While there is still plenty of banter and décolletage abounds in the latest television adaptation of Tom Jones, it all plays second-fiddle to double-dealings and seemingly star-crossed love.
When she herself give birth soon after a whirlwind marriage to a cruel military man, young Tom (Jacobi Jupe) has high hopes of a playmate, but William Blifil (Kit Rakusen and then James Wilbraham) quickly becomes something more akin to a rival – constantly belittling and undermining his cousin.
No sooner does Tom find friendship with hunter Black George Seagrim (Dean Lennox Kelly), then William has him arrested for poaching. And when Tom wins the affections of “a girl from the other side of the world”, their exotic neighbour Sophia Weston (Sophie Wilde), William begins planting the seed that he would make far more appropriate marriage material for her, especially since Tom is already the subject of a “disgraceful“ paternity claim by Seagrim’s daughter Molly (Lucy Fallon).
Sophia though, is most definitely not keen on the “looming, panting” Blifil.
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Tom Jones won four Oscars at the 1964 Academy Awards.
Describing Fielding’s original text as “the mother of all rom-coms”, screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes (2018’s Vanity Fair, 2007’s Miss Austen Regrets) definitely seems to lean into more of a PG-rated Bridgerton-esque romp than the “social satire written in blood with a broadaxe” (as Time magazine so beautifully put it) of the hit movie.
But instead of following that tone by employing the source book’s Lady Whistledown-style narrator, we get scene-setting voice-overs by Sophia herself, which definitely quickly establishes a less-bawdy and more baldly romantic tone.
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Solly McLeod is Tom Jones.
While there are still saucy bedroom encounters, plenty of banter and decolletage abounds, that all does really play second-fiddle to the double-dealing and seemingly star-crossed love of Tom and Sophia.
That doesn’t mean that this well acted, beautifully costumed and exquisitely designed production is a disappointment, it just feels more like something Austen-tatious, or with a Bronte-beat, than its actual picaresque, humorous provenance.
Tom Jones debuts on TVNZ 1 on Saturday, May 20 at 8.55pm.
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