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Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story

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Finally I treated myself to the complete Anne of Green Gables DVD set — the 25-year-old VHS tapes just don’t display the Prince Edward Island scenery to its best advantage on a flat-screen TV.

Besides reading most of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne series, I’ve seen the Sullivan Entertainment Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea more times than I can remember. Anne is the ideal for an INFP like me; I like to think that once upon a time I had her potential, minus the ambition.

I’ve seen that regular Anne devotees don’t like The Continuing Story installment and read that due to a copyright dispute Sullivan couldn’t use material from Montgomery’s later books as he had for Anne of Avonlea. Many fans, perhaps unaware of this issue, hate this series because it deviates so widely from the established story and has some nasty continuity errors (for example, Anne and Gilbert would have been well into middle age by World War I).

I don’t hate The Continuing Story because it deviates from the Anne story and its timeline. I hate it because it’s a weak story that has nothing to do with Anne of Green Gables. Even if you can imagine that it’s not about Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe of Avonlea and that is just another movie set during World War I, the plot is such a convoluted, implausible mishmosh and the visuals so flat that it’s a bad showing all around. It doesn’t help that, while Anne and Gilbert are supposed to be in their early 20s, Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie were in their early 30s when the series was filmed — well past the freshness of college and first jobs.

If all else shone, the continuity issues would be the kind of details I could overlook as poetic license. But nothing in this series works — nothing. All the elements that coalesced to make the previous installments conquer and capture millions of hearts across the globe are missing from this unrelentingly grim, joyless mess.

Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story — Plot

Conflict is at the heart of any plot, and as a girl and later as a young woman Anne’s tendency to daydream, act on impulse, and lash out in temper led her into any number of scrapes, some more serious than others. Her romantic fixation on Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” sets off her trouble at the very beginning and later leads to a fateful accident and rescue. When she isn’t daydreaming, writing, or sharing her hopes with Marilla or bosom friend Diana, she’s sparring with Avonlea’s busybody and gossip in chief, Rachel Lynde. Part of the reason Anne is beloved is because we like to see ourselves in her and because we recognize the dramas of girlhood which become more significant when she begins her teaching career in Anne of Avonlea. Despite the Rachel Lyndes, the Pringles, and the Katherine Brookes of the world, Anne, her imagination, and her vision prevail. That’s what we love — the idealism and the conviction that imagination doesn’t have to be suppressed or obliterated by conventional society, that it can thrive despite the human and social obstacles.

Anne and Gilbert are past the broken-slate stage of life, and The Continuing Story needed a more mature plot and conflict. Sullivan takes us from the small-town squabbles of Avonlea (first series) and the politics of private-school teaching (second series) to the conflict to end all conflicts — World War I. Our heroine, whose most nerve-wracking moments to date have been reciting poetry to sophisticates and islanders at the White Sands Hotel, awaiting test scores to see if she beat Gilbert Blythe academically, facing down the Pringle clan, and more of the same, now finds herself dodging bullets, shells, and spies in a torturous plot that plays on none of her beloved qualities.

Near the beginning Anne meets a publisher who wants adventure books written for women (although not by women). That’s what The Continuing Story tries to be — a woman’s adventure story, with a wife braving the front in France during WWI to find her MIA husband, a sort of Ernest Hemingway SuperLite. Despite the shelling, the bullets, the amputations, and the sense that there’s supposed to be ever-present danger, there’s no dramatic tension in sight, and the story drags on and on and on. I watched the second chapter for what seemed like a long, dreary time, then decided I needed a break. When I checked the time marker on the DVD for the remaining time, I saw that I had watched 10 minutes. Ten minutes! It felt like at least 30 or more. This is not exactly the desired denouement for a good war or adventure film.

There’s a plethora of implausible coincidences (for example, Anne manages to run into Fred Wright and Jack almost the moment she reaches the French front), but every attempt at dramatic tension falls flatter than a crepe — so flat that even if you had been told every spoiler ahead of viewing The Continuing Story, it wouldn’t ruin the series for you. It’s that dull and lifeless.

Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story — Setting

As you’d guess from the plot, you’re not going to be spending much time on Prince Edward Island or even in eastern Canada — most of the film is set in New York, London, France, and Germany. The indoor scenes could be anywhere — indeed, they were filmed in Canada — so there’s no sense of New York, London, or any other location. These vintage buildings, and the tight outdoor shots designed to hide geography and sets, made me yearn for the strong sense of place and community both the books and previous series are known for.

As for embattled France, it too consists of tight shots that make Gil’s field hospital and the various camps look just like what they are — sets. The uniformly low, gray skies add to the effect, and so do the scenes of soldiers, nuns, Red Cross workers, doctors, and nurses running willy nilly back and forth — it’s as though they’re there to add senseless movement and energy and to keep the already small spaces filled. Instead of looking like people caught in the chaos and terror of war, they look like extras whose director hasn’t given them direction, leaving them to flit about randomly.

New York, France, London, and Germany are sandwiched between establishing and concluding scenes set closer to the places Anne’s admirers have come to love. In an interesting, ill-conceived twist, Sullivan seems determined to obliterate the one place that is dear to everyone — Green Gables. In five short years, an absentee Anne has allowed what “people in Avonlea say [is] the prettiest acreage on the north shore” (Marilla) to become the kind of rundown shanty you might see in Pennsylvania when the farm’s been abandoned for decades. If you’re thinking, “Anne would never have let this happen to the home Matthew and Marilla kept up so meticulously,” you’re right. How could such a desirable house and farm have become so decrepit in a mere five years? How could Anne let it? The shutters are loose and askew, the fences are broken, and — best of all — there’s not an inch of paint left on the weathered boards of the house. Renters! Then, when Gil and Anne try to save Green Gables, they accidentally set fire to the once-airy, now mysteriously dark, forbidding house. It’s as if Sullivan wanted to obliterate the very heart of the work that made his name and fortune. This brings us to . . .

Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story — Characters

Anne Shirley, bright, imaginative, inventive, dreamy, inspired by Tennyson and devoted to Gilbert once she realizes she loves him, is recognizable only because she’s played by Megan Follows. First, Sullivan has her being cozy with Fred Wright (yes, bosom friend Diana’s dull but good husband) as well as an unlikeable adventure writer named Jack whom she meets in New York and, improbably, in several other places. He may be an adventurer and spy, but Jack manages not to be any more interesting than Fred — which should be irrelevant, because Anne is just now starting life with Gilbert after years of separation. The Anne we know isn’t that light or feckless.

The Anne who once yearned for puffed sleeves and pearls now sports tailored suits and dresses with gaudy geometric patterns — stylish, yes, but not reflective of her tastes. No matter where she is or what her circumstances, Anne always looks like she just stepped out of a popular fashion catalog. She doesn’t look like someone scraping by. Beyond the clothes, hats, and trim hairdo reminiscent of Katherine Brooke’s, Anne retains nothing of her old self. When she isn’t being distracted by Fred or Jack, she’s so single minded in her search for Gilbert that all sense of personality is lost. Imagination, the literature of romance, the attachment to community, even her smile, are lost to the grimly unrelenting bore she becomes. War changes people, but from the beginning Anne isn’t Anne.

Once Anne declared her feelings for Gilbert, fans wanted to see them together as two strong-willed, bright people in love with all the joys and conflicts that come with it. To avoid that possibility, Sullivan makes Gilbert disappear for more than half the movie. Indeed, Jack the uninspiring adventure writer seems to get as much screen time as our Gilbert. For huge swathes of footage, Fred Wright is more front and center than the male lead. Even when Gilbert does reappear, Anne leaves him to talk to Jack. Gilbert has been transformed into a earnest young doctor, a two-dimensional shadow of his adolescent self, when he had not only a mind and a heart, but a personality.

In the meantime, bosom friend Diana has become such a tiresome snob that her own high-and-mighty mother, Mrs. Barry, has to rebuke her. Mrs. Lynde, Moody Spurgeon, and Josie Pye (now Mrs. Spurgeon) make token appearances, with Josie magically become a shrill, self-righteous patriot.

Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story is ironically named; there’s nothing about this story that is recognizable, let alone familiar. When I watch Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea again, I won’t envision a future state where Green Gables is a wreck, Gilbert has the charm of a post office, Diana is a fashionably dressed fishwife, and Anne foregoes Tennyson for a nun’s habit and a spy’s mission. I have an imagination, and I can imagine this abomination away. Like a certain Dallas storyline, it was all a bad dream — a nightmare that never happened.

Doctor Atomic, my first opera

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For someone who jokingly calls herself a pretentious dilettante, I’m not very good at being one. Despite my appreciation of music, I have never liked ballet or opera. If pressed to articulate why not, I might say that both seem to me to be very artificial forms of expression. I like music, I like dance, and I like song, but when music is combined with song or dance and a story, it loses its connection to life as I know it and becomes a pretense, like much of the modern art that holds no appeal for me, either.

That can’t be the full explanation, however, as I do love a good stage or movie musical, and seven mountain men dancing at a barn raising or a silent film star singing and dancing with his umbrella partner aren’t realism, either. I’m also fond of symbolism, allegory, myth, and things that go bump in the night, that is, I’m not limited to the realism category.

There’s also the troublesome fact that I’ve seen one ballet (The Nutcracker, many years ago, when my employer provided us with free tickets) and no opera except for brief bits on TV, so my dislike has been based more on theory than on experience.

Now, however, I’ve seen an opera — Doctor Atomic at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

A friend who is an opera fan and Lyric season ticket holder had bought these tickets in addition to her subscription series. She thought that her husband might like a break from the opera, especially since Doctor Atomic is a modern opera, which generally is not to his taste.

Who am I to turn down a $176 ticket that I couldn’t afford to see something I’ve never seen?

I liked it. I would have liked an hour or so less of it better, I admit. Nearly three and one-half hours of sitting, with one break, tests my powers of physical endurance. Still, I liked it.

Doctor Atomic is the story of the race to build and test the “Gadget,” a discordantly innocuous name for the A-bomb. With a few exceptions, Peter Sellars adapted his libretto from the quotations and writings of the participants, as well as excerpts from poetry.

The scientists are headed by Renaissance man J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley, baritone), who loves and quotes the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, while General Leslie Groves (Eric Owens, bass-baritone) leads the military. They were an odd pair in more than the obvious ways; during the project Oppenheimer’s weight dropped to less than 100 pounds, while General Groves’ photos reveal a distinct portliness that stretches his uniform to its limits. In Doctor Atomic, the testy general, concerned that Oppenheimer is going to have a breakdown, sings ruefully about his lifelong weight issues and his diet journal, in which he records transgressions such as two brownies and three pieces of chocolate cake.

Oppenheimer’s foil is Hungarian scientist Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink, baritone), a cynic whose humor is black (before the test, he offers the team suntan lotion) and whose position is ambivalent. Pacifist Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn, tenor) anticipates the 1960s activist, with his petition demanding that at the least Japan be warned of what is being planned.

On the principle that behind every good man is a woman, and behind every good opera is a soprano, Kitty Oppenheimer (Jessica Rivera) brings a human counterpoint to her husband’s outwardly stoic determination to complete the Gadget and the test. Meredith Arwady (contralto) plays Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Indian nurse whose deepest tones seem wrenched from the heart of the earth mother herself. Military meteorologist Jack Hubbard (James Maddalena, baritone) offers most of the little comic relief as General Groves demands better weather conditions and threatens the junior officer with insubordination for refusing to promise to provide it.

Absurd as the general’s orders are, they are no more so than the very concept of an opera based on the development of the A-bomb seems to be. On the other hand, what better or bigger subject for an American opera? Like Frankenstein and other stories of man’s exploration of god-like powers, Doctor Atomic hovers between the genius of creation and the ethics of destruction. Oppenheimer understands the awesome power of the idea that he must make concrete, but disingenuously leaves it to the “men in Washington” and their wisdom to decide whether to unleash the bomb’s powers. These are enormous themes, carried over from the nineteenth century’s fascination with science; defining much of twentieth century life with its Cold War fears and anxieties; and seeping into the twenty-first century, when it is no longer just “men in Washington” and their communist counterparts but mad tyrants and terrorists whose fingers may hover over the nuclear button.

Oppenheimer, who dubs the test “Trinity,” calls upon the three-personed God of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV:

BATTER my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
*****
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

It takes poetry from throughout the ages, from the Bhagavad Gita to John Donne to Muriel Rukeyser, to address the timelessness and power of creation and destruction and man’s responsibility for both. Even as Oppenheimer, Teller, and Wilson grapple with ethics and expediency, targets are being identified for the “psychological impact” their destruction will have on the Japanese people — and on the watching world. Even as the team waits for the weather to clear, they cannot be certain that Trinity won’t burn off the Earth’s entire atmosphere. Somehow it is a risk that must be taken.

In the opera’s only romantic scene, Kitty Oppenheimer seems to represent the creative (and neglected) power of sex, while in Act II she seems driven to near-madness by visions of destruction (Rukeyser: “In the flame-brilliant midnight, promises arrive, singing to each of use with tongues of flame . . .”), even as Pasqualita, an Indian Gaia, nurtures her and her children — the future. Kitty quotes Rukeyser:

Those who most long for peace now pour their lives on war
Our conflics carry creation and its guilt . . .

Pasqualita, quoting Rukeyser, is prophetic:

The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back.
News came on the frost, “The dead are on the march!”

Doctor Atomic ends on what appears to be an anticlimax. The ensemble stretches out in self-defensive positions, much as children of the 1960s were taught do during air raid drills, save for two technicians who monitor the instruments. The test goes off quietly, leaving in its wake an intact atmosphere and a woman’s voice speaking in Japanese. We know what happened. Or do we? The history of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy is not yet over, and their legacy is not yet known.

As might be expected, the staging is stark, and so is the music. There are no lush orchestral moments, and little soprano and tenor brightness. The music is arrhythmic, somewhat discordant in places, and thoroughly modern. Various instruments are used as voices, and the singers are used as instruments, occasionally struggling a bit with what John Adams’ composition calls upon their voices to do. Conductor Robert Spano, whose intense face I could see clearly from my fourth-row seat, holds the orchestra together nicely throughout the nearly three and one-half hours.

I am not sure that Doctor Atomic has made me love opera, especially as it suffers from two faults that I associate with the art form — it is overly long and it is overwrought. I liked it, however, and to be fair in my judgment I will need to experience a more traditional production — one whose music and arias may stir my emotions as Doctor Atomic stimulated my intellect and interest in the fate of humanity.

Doctor Atomic
Music: John Adams
Libretto and direction: Peter Sellars

Site A, where the world's first nuclear reactor is buried
Site A, where the world’s first nuclear reactor is buried
August 23, 2020