A BAD `MYSTERY'? OH, THE HORROR!
Author: By John Koch, Globe Staff Date: 10/12/2000 Page: B8 Section: Living
TELEVISION REVIEW
The Wyvern Mystery
Starring: Derek Jacobi, Naomi Watts, Iain Glen, and Jack Davenport
Produced by: Ruth Baumgarten
Directed by: Alex Pillai
Screenplay by: David Pirie
Based on the novel by: J.S. Le Fanu
On: PBS (WGBH-TV, Channel 2)
Time: Tonight and next Thursday at 9
Rated: TVPG The season's first PBS "Mystery!," a two-parter called "The Wyvern Mystery," is part bodice-ripping romance, part mystery, and far less than the sum of its parts. Based on the novel by the once popular 19th-century author J.S. Le Fanu, it mainly concerns the fate of pretty Alice Maybell who's orphaned as a girl and taken into the landed and frightfully odd Fairfield family. The two-hour miniseries airs tonight and next Thursday at 9 p.m. on WGBH-TV (Channel 2).
The fatherly old squire, played by Derek Jacobi, like everything else in this ragged, breast-heaving shocker, isn't what he appears to be. He all but wrestles his innocent ward into marriage before his dashing elder son Charles spirits her away and weds her himself. Charles is played by young Richard Chamberlain look-alike Iain Glen, and he and Naomi Watts are convincingly ardent in the bedroom scenes in their secluded manor house.
Viewers may be relieved and even cheered by this rescue early in tonight's program, but I wager they won't make much sense of the many horrors that follow the happy couple's athletic honeymoon. The real mystery of the two progressively confused and contorted hours of "The Wyvern Mystery" is the stark absence of almost any dramatic logic or explanatory details.
A stranger or two seem to be living in a dark wing of Charles's estate. Alice strays into the off-limits rooms, encountering revolting bugs, and once, spying through a keyhole, sees her dour housekeeper injecting drugs into the withered arm of . . . well, we don't know at the time. Alice becomes pregnant and suffers "Rosemary's Baby"-like nightmares. In reality, a mad woman in black with terrible burn scars and a Transylvanian-sounding accent will soon break through her bedroom wall and . . . well, although I do know what happens, I won't spoil the sordid surprise should you somehow manage to stick with "Wyvern" this long.
It's almost impossible to believe the original Le Fanu fiction was as exposition-free and as ultimately arbitrary as this BBC-produced adaptation. Generally good acting and technical accomplishments like "Wyvern" 's skillful camera work and nice period production design are utterly wasted on the irritatingly elliptical and opaque storytelling.
Whether necessary connective events were ignored by the scriptwriter or edited out of the film later doesn't much matter. What's left are archaic horror-story-set pieces the worried filmmakers try vainly to knit up with stagey atmospherics. The in-your-ear musical score is an especially painful example of such desperate attempts to compensate for the holes in the story. Ominous, nervy-sounding passages of mass violins announce and underline presumably scary moments. Far worse is a lower, almost continous drone resembling the in-flight roar of a jet engine.
Commenting on the mounting sorrows inflicted on poor Alice, one of the characters says, " 'Tis hard to bear." He might as well have been reviewing this misguided "Mystery!"