Cautionary Tale Without Cliches 1984

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

RV

As narrative, Nineteen Eighty-Four is simple to the point of banality. Complexities of plot and psychology are, as George Orwell understood, inimical to the cautionary tale. He deliberately cast his main characters--Winston Smith and his lover Julia, the doomed spiritual and sexual revolutionaries opposing the Stalinesque exactions of Oceania--as archetypes of the ordinary. They are a modern Everyman and Everywoman pitilessly propelled forward into a future that seemed all too possible in 1949, when the novel was published. The recent passing of Orwell's prophetic date has not rendered their lives or their fates much less plausible.

What Orwell could not foresee was that his novel would become perhaps the most pervasive fiction of the nuclear age. Any would-be movie adapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four knows that a work so well and easily remembered requires revision if the film is to evoke a response beyond the merely respectful. In these circumstances, the achievement of Michael Radford and his actors is subtle and brave.

John Hurt, for example, plays Winston as if he were suffering the last stages of consumption; repellent in his grayness and enervation, Hurt is oddly compelling too. As Julia, Suzanna Hamilton plays her harshly lighted love scenes with a nakedness, both physical and emotional, that is astonishing in its neediness. By making the romance more explicit, Radford gives it a pathos and a symbolic weight that are, if anything, more affecting than in the novel. Finally, the late Richard Burton as O'Brien, the couple's betrayer and interrogator, gives a last performance that is all silky corruption, perfumed malice in every beautifully measured phrase.

For this second screen version of Nineteen Eighty-Four (the first appeared in 1956), the man who has done the most to intensify Orwell's vision is Production Designer Allan Cameron. He has remained faithful to the futurology of Orwell's day, avoiding reference to technologies that have evolved since the novel was written. Typically the omnipresent telescreens project Big Brother's propaganda in black and white, never color, and their shape is that of antique sets. At the Ministry of Truth, no one has ever heard of the microchip. The height of sophisticated communication is represented by the pneumatic tube and the dial phone. And when O'Brien tortures Winston into submissiveness to the state, his instruments are the old-fashioned table with leather straps and electroshock. All of this matches perfectly the external world through which Winston and Julia stumble: it looks like a vast, bombed- out housing development. Cameron thus carefully upsets our common visual assumptions about things to come. With antiseptic cliches banished, we are forced to confront a basic truth: the will to tyrannize is utterly independent of technology. It is present in every time, place and setting. And it will abide.