E4
Television
PBS’S ‘THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK’
Finally, an ‘Anne Frank’ deserving of the screen
by Hank Stuever
It’s easy to get Anne Frank
wrong. Her memory has lived on in a way that surpasses some of history’s eternal names, and her story has been put to many pur- poses, most of them focused on lessons of the Holocaust. That sometimes makes it hard to comprehend the actual teen- ager behind the martyred icon. Tourists go to the claustropho- bically small attic in Amsterdam (now a museum) by the thou- sands each year, touching the walls, hoping to connect some- how. Unfortunately, when it came to adapting “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” to the stage (in 1955) and to the movie screen (in 1959), we failed. Both were writ- ten and performed in ways that now seem almost bizarrely trite and glossy, if not creepy and in- accurate. Hollywood and Broad- way’s “The Diary of Anne Frank” — as seen for decades on English- class movie projectors and VCRs, or as portrayed by the drama club — did wonders for book sales but mushed up the story for main- stream, postwar American tastes. Thus, a cheerfully precocious girl is optimistically marched off to the death camps, hoping only the best for the world; in some ways, all the early adaptations of “The Diary of Anne Frank” lacked were show tunes. Later attempts (Melissa Gilbert
played her in a TV movie in 1980; Natalie Portman played her in a Broadway revival in 1997) tried to restore the essence and mystery of the diary in a more complicat- ed emotional field, where it be-
come the emblem for so many? The literary scholar Francine
Prose, in a fascinating book last year called “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife,” laid out a case for the very phenom- enon that this new film seeks to decompress: We’ve heaped too much meaning on poor Anne. Underneath everything that we demand of her, even now, there remains a great story well told — and, at last, a very good movie.
DARLOW SMITHSON PRODUCTIONS
ANNE, FRANKLY: Ellie Kendrick stars in a new British movie that portrays the diarist as herself, not the voice of millions.
longs.
Finally, on PBS Sunday night (on what happens to be Holo- caust Remembrance Day), an ab- sorbing and smartly simple Brit- ish adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” has done what all the other movies and stage shows failed to do: In both its edgier screenplay and grittier charac- ters, it offers a much more real- istic interpretation of Anne Frank’s days in the attic with her
mother, father, sister, the three members of the “van Daan” fami- ly and the dentist “Albert Dussel.” (This version retains the pseudo- nyms Otto Frank gave the attic’s other residents when Anne’s dia- ry was first published posthu- mously in 1947.)
At last, these small series of rooms above Otto’s spice business feel as confining and yet as broad as the diary that describes them. Obsessed with details and accu-
racy, this version shows us a real girl, in a note-perfect perform- ance from 20-year-old Ellie Ken- drick (who had a supporting part in “An Education”), instead of some slightly oppressed version of Nancy Drew. Here, Anne is not yet the voice of millions; she is herself. Her im- petuousness and callousness in the first half of the movie almost dare us to appreciate her, or even like her much.
By most accounts, and certain- ly through an objective reading of her own words, that was the real Anne: a bit of a spoiled brat whose self-confidence and out- spokenness exasperated those forced to live with her in close quarters; and yet whose sharp observations of their feelings and fears skillfully conveyed the ab- ject paranoia and terror of the Holocaust in a personal way. How fair is it for one girl’s story to be-
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Directed by Jon Jones and su- perbly scripted by Deborah Mog- gach, this “Diary of Anne Frank” relies first and foremost on the text of the diary, which seems like a no-brainer, but is precisely where earlier versions erred. Alongside Anne’s outpourings, the residents of the attic get a new treatment, with a new em- phasis on shape, depth and be- lievability. Here, Petronella Van Daan (Lesley Sharp) is still the snooty ogre all adaptations have made her out to be but at last breaks the spell Shelley Winters cast on the role in the 1959 movie. Older sister Margot Frank finally gets her due, thanks to the under- stated performance of Felicity Jones; likewise praise goes to Tamsin Greig as Edith Frank, showing us a subtler and more sympathetic side of Anne’s moth- er that we may not have consid- ered. This is tricky stuff; we’re talk- ing about a book and a set of characters that countless readers have fixed in their minds with ex- tremely specific ideas and im- agery. Millions of people have gone on reading and rereading Anne, thinking about her, argu- ing about her — and for all the preservation efforts and careful archiving work of Anne Frank so- cieties, time nevertheless passes and the real Anne slips further away. The death this year of 100-year-
old Miep Gies, who knew and he- roically protected the Frank fami- ly during the years it hid in the at- tic, brought a finality to the idea that we in this century are con- nected to the story. Perhaps this is why, at last, we can make a bet- ter movie about it — and have. The past 15 years have seen a
wave of new and compelling ar- guments about Frank’s literary intent and her father’s bowdleriz- ing certain intimate details about her sexuality and anger at her mother — passages that were re- stored in 1995 and are intact here as Kendrick’s vulnerable Anne lingers in the bathroom and frets about her urges to touch her body. These passages about sex- ual desires and attraction to, and then disinterest in, teenage Peter Van Daan (played here by saucer- eyed Geoff Breton) attracted a lot of attention when they were final- ly published.
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But more interesting is what scholars have learned about the competing drafts and versions of the diary. It seems all but certain that Anne revised her writings to win a sort of contest she had heard about on the radio in 1944, which encouraged Dutch citizens to collect their narrative memo- ries of wartime so that the best of them could eventually be pub- lished. This version of “The Diary of
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Anne Frank” wisely details that very moment, when it dawns on Anne and the other residents of the attic that their attic story might one day mean something, and there is only one writer in the house to do the job. It might be moviemaking license to imagine such a reckoning, but here, it is nothing short of that joyous spark, when a writer realizes that she can write, that she was meant to write. With that comes all the doubt, neuroses and frustrations of a budding literary voice with a real deadline to meet. Up till now, dramatic adapta- tions of the diary have focused on its universal themes of goodwill and hope amidst horror, thanks to the famous line in the diary in which Anne said she believed
people are, in spite of everything,
good at heart. That’s all still here, as it must be, before the story abruptly ends with the death of a young Jewish teenager who sym- bolizes the loss of 6 million peo- ple.
But when you watch this ver- sion, you can be struck by a new sense of loss — the death of a po- tentially great writer. For once, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is a movie about an artist.
stueverh@washpost.com
The Diary of Anne Frank
(two hours) airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on WETA and MPT.
K
KLMNO
SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2010
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