North & South (2004) was a TV miniseries directed by Brian Percival. The movie is based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell wrote her novels one generation after Jane Austen. Like Austen's works, the novel is, in essence, a romance. However, it's much more complicated than that.
The novel is set in the mid-19th century, when England was moving toward the height of industrialization. Margaret Hale is a young woman who has been uprooted from her rural home in the south of England, and finds herself in a highly industrialized northern city. (Called Milton, but meant to represent Manchester.) Hale is portrayed brilliantly by Daniela Denby-Ashe.
The situation in Manchester is different from the situation in the south. In Manchester, money is everything. There's no real relationship between the factories owners and the workers. It's cash for labor, and if you get sick, or get hurt, it's your problem, not the owner's problem.
One of the mill owners is John Thornton (Richard Armitage), who is a self-made man. He treats the mill workers slightly better than the other owners, but primarily because he believes that a healthy worker is a better worker.
Poverty is everywhere. The workers live in squalor, and it's not pretty. (The BBC always gives you a sense of place in their films. They succeed brilliantly in this movie.) I know something about Victorian England, and I'm aware that most of the city population lived in misery, even before illness intervened. And, of course, given these deplorable conditions, illness often intervened. People were always fearful of the workhouse, because it was truly considered by many a fate worse than death. That's what we see in this movie.
Beside the two leads, two supporting actors deserve special attention: Sinéad Cusack as Hannah Thornton, John Thornton's mother, and Brendan Coyle as Nicholas Higgins, a union leader facing insurmountable odds. Both play their roles brilliantly.
This isn't a pleasant movie to watch, because so much of it is so grim. On the other hand, the acting is excellent, and the attention to setting is so meticulous, that I feel comfortable recommending it. North and South was made for television, so it works well on the small screen. It has an extremely high IMDb rating of 8.6. I agreed, and rated it 9.
The novel is set in the mid-19th century, when England was moving toward the height of industrialization. Margaret Hale is a young woman who has been uprooted from her rural home in the south of England, and finds herself in a highly industrialized northern city. (Called Milton, but meant to represent Manchester.) Hale is portrayed brilliantly by Daniela Denby-Ashe.
The situation in Manchester is different from the situation in the south. In Manchester, money is everything. There's no real relationship between the factories owners and the workers. It's cash for labor, and if you get sick, or get hurt, it's your problem, not the owner's problem.
One of the mill owners is John Thornton (Richard Armitage), who is a self-made man. He treats the mill workers slightly better than the other owners, but primarily because he believes that a healthy worker is a better worker.
Poverty is everywhere. The workers live in squalor, and it's not pretty. (The BBC always gives you a sense of place in their films. They succeed brilliantly in this movie.) I know something about Victorian England, and I'm aware that most of the city population lived in misery, even before illness intervened. And, of course, given these deplorable conditions, illness often intervened. People were always fearful of the workhouse, because it was truly considered by many a fate worse than death. That's what we see in this movie.
Beside the two leads, two supporting actors deserve special attention: Sinéad Cusack as Hannah Thornton, John Thornton's mother, and Brendan Coyle as Nicholas Higgins, a union leader facing insurmountable odds. Both play their roles brilliantly.
This isn't a pleasant movie to watch, because so much of it is so grim. On the other hand, the acting is excellent, and the attention to setting is so meticulous, that I feel comfortable recommending it. North and South was made for television, so it works well on the small screen. It has an extremely high IMDb rating of 8.6. I agreed, and rated it 9.