I refuse to watch “The Handmaid’s Tale” until a certain administration is out of the White House, because from what I hear, it’s tracking a little too close to reality and I can’t yet. But I looked for other Margaret Atwood books to read, and sure enough, I found “Alias Grace.”
This book is about Grace Marks, who we know at the beginning is a convicted murderess who is being examined by Dr. Simon Jordan, who is attempting to help (?) her remember the murders that almost got her executed. Grace, alongside another house servant, James McDermott, were accused of killing the house’s master, Kinnear, and Nancy, the head servant/Kinnear’s side chick.
This book was published in 1996 and set in the early-to-mid-1800s, but sometimes, the language is quite relevant to today. Consider these nuggets:
“Would that be me you’re addressing? said McDermott. No it would not, I said with a cool manner as I walked by him. I thought I could tell what he had in mind, and it was not original.”
Just Grace trying to walk around without being harassed by a man. Little too on the nose, eh?
“This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.”
This is Grace talking about Dr. Jordan and this sounds a lot like mansplaining. And of course throughout this book, it’s pretty obvious that although Simon’s the doctor, it’s Grace who is pulling his strings — telling him things that might pique his interest. He, on the other hand, is not doing a very good job of diagnosing Grace and is actually getting it on with his landlady whose husband has left her. In other words, she’s in a better headspace than he is.
This book was beautifully written and patiently laid out by Atwood, and still the story moves fairly quickly. Even at the end, you’re not totally sure of Grace’s culpability in the murders, although I’m pretty sure she did it of her own volition.
After I read the book, I thought to myself, “This has to be just as good as ‘Handmaid’s Tale.’ Why doesn’t anyone make it a series?”
And of course Netflix was on the case. And when I saw the cast list, I kinda lost it a little bit:
OK, let me tell you about my obsession with Paul Gross. So I got hooked on this show right as I was going to college called “Due South.” Paul Gross was in “Due South” and he wore the hell out of a Mountie uniform. The premise is that a Mountie (Gross) straight out of Canada comes to Chicago trying to find his father’s murderer, then decides to just stick around and help a Chicago cop solve crimes. Still dressed as a Mountie. Yes, some people would categorize this as corny, but those people would not be friends of mine. Got it?
I have all three seasons’ worth of “Due South” soundtracks and I’m not ashamed. I watched every single episode of this show, in my dorm room at 1 a.m. (which was the only time you could find the thing as CBS began shuffling the show’s start time around. Anybody remember when you couldn’t record something on TV or pause it to go the bathroom? I present to you the late 1990s.) Anyway, this show was comforting to me for some reason and I then endeavored to watch everything Paul Gross was in.
This, uh, has not been without some pain, including “Men with Brooms,” a movie about curling and “Aspen Extreme,” which makes me embarrassed for Paul Gross.
But it’s been more reward. For instance, if you have never watched “Slings and Arrows,” well, go watch it. (You have time.) There’s a young Rachel McAdams and Gross’ real-life wife, Martha Burns, who is a great actress — and very damn lucky.
Anyway, so that’s why I decided to watch “Alias Grace.” It takes a while for Paul Gross to appear in this miniseries, so there’s time to appreciate the performance of the lead actress, Sarah Gadon.
Gadon is sneaky good in this role, because the first time there’s a scene showing her egging McDermott on to murder, it’s genuinely shocking. Gadon is great at expressing the mental instability present in Grace, how her mental state deteriorates from losing her mother and her best friend Mary, who dies after a botched abortion. There’s some similarities between Mary’s situation and Nancy’s — Mary was impregnated by the son of the house masters where Mary and Grace are working. And while Grace tries to help Mary, she doesn’t seem to have this inclination with Nancy.
Also present in this series is Anna Paquin as Nancy. I have to say that when I read the book, I asked myself why Grace and McDermott would care if Nancy was knocking boots with the man of the house. Sure, Nancy is supposed to also be the help but is also barking out orders, but still. Is it worth killing someone? Paquin helps answer this question by playing Nancy as the type of person you would want to punch in the face. Hard. Paquin’s Nancy is every terrible boss you ever had who also was trying desperately to be your friend. Even when her time comes and McDermott goes to attack her with an axe, you’re kind of like:
Jeremiah the peddler plays a pivotal role in this series as well, and it took me a while to place the actor who plays him. OK, *I* never placed him — Google did. He was Shazam! So that’s why you don’t judge books by covers because Zachary Levi also does a great job in this series and looks pretty good when he’s not wearing that Shazam suit. I got the sense in the book that Jeremiah was just a hustler of sorts, trying to make money anywhere he could. It just makes sense that he’d go to becoming a traveling hypnotist. Yet somehow, his approach is starting to make more sense to observers than the psychiatry approach because it’s pretty clear that something is not quite right with Dr. Jordan.
Edward Holcroft’s Dr. Jordan drifts from disinterest in Grace to outright boredom, then sudden obsession. Even in the book, this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. It’s obvious that there’s one difference between he and Grace, which might have been the thing that doomed him — he doesn’t know who he is. Grace, even if she’s a stone-cold murderer, has come to terms with who she is and has moved past the idea of pretending to be someone else or caring what others think of her. Dr. Jordan, despite his relatively stable background, has no clue what he’s doing or what he’s supposed to do with his life. (The first hint has got to be presenting Grace with the potatoes, right?) Then, upon extricating himself from Grace’s case, he then joins the army and a war and then marries a woman his mother picked out for him.
Then there’s Mr. Kinnear, played by my man Paul Gross. I’ve never seen him play a bad guy or someone who doesn’t whimsically end up talking to ghosts (it’s a thing with his roles). But one good thing about his bad guy is that he doesn’t overplay it — there’s enough ambiguity in there to make you wonder if perhaps he’s misunderstood. Maybe if you fall in love with your maid, it’s not so bad to get another maid so you can sort of pretend she’s your wife? OK, yeah, it’s shady as hell, and obviously Nancy didn’t think this through in hiring yet another young girl for him. I’m going to place Paul Gross’ Kinnear right up there with Jason Bateman’s character in “Juno.” Remember how you felt when he started hitting on Juno? I’m pretty sure I can’t unsee how Kinnear looked at Grace when she was bent over cleaning up after Nancy. Bleh. Totally unsettling creeper performances that almost make you think you could never watch that actor in anything else. Almost. This is still Paul Gross.
Obviously, Margaret Atwood is really good at capturing what the world looks like trapped by masculinity. I would almost say “toxic” but there’s not a lot that toxic about Dr. Jordan, for example, and yet, he is obviously affected by the expectations that masculinity presents. He doesn’t project those expectations on anyone else — really it swallows him. That’s why Atwood’s work is making a rebound right now — at a time when we are all thinking a lot about gender roles and how damaging restrictions on them might be.
For some reason, the series decided on a different ending from the book. First of all, Grace is pardoned and lands in the hands of the preacher who’d been advocating for her after her conviction. They then take Grace to meet an unknown man who wanted to see her, and she doesn’t realize until she gets there that it’s Kinnear’s flute-playing neighbor boy, Jamie. Jamie, who had a crush on her when she was a servant girl, and then testified against her at her murder trial. He proposes to Grace, and they marry. But Jamie’s not such a sweet kid anymore — he appears to get off on hearing Grace’s tortured prison sufferings. (Grace also notes that she’s not getting a maid for their tiny house, which is definitely wise.) Instead of marrying the girl his mom wanted for him, as in the book, Dr. Jordan is injured at war and is in some type of catatonic state, until he receives a letter from Grace. As his mother reads it aloud, Simon stirs a bit. Who wanted this ending? No one, no one. No, here’s the ending I wanted for Grace, who, by the way, was a real person.
[ potential Grace Marks job interview after prison pardon ]Employer, looking over her resume: “It does appear there are some gaps to your employment history. Would you be able to explain that?”
Grace: “… And so forth.”
Employer: “And so forth?”
Grace: “Just because you pester me to know everything is no reason for me to tell you.”