Reptileenbu
Did you people see the same film I saw?
Glucedee
It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.
Logan Dodd
There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.
robbiekendalrk
Barry was a member of the Pagford Parish Council and due to his death they have to elect someone to take his place. The candidates were: Mr Colin Wall, the Headmaster at the local school; the dependent Mr Miles Mollison, the son of the self-absorbed Parish Council leader Howard Mollison; and the abusive Mr Simon Price, Barry's half-brother. Simon pulls out of the election after his son, Andrew, creates a Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother who mocks the candidates. In the end Mr Miles Mollison wins the election by one vote as Mr Colin Wall votes against himself. The Pagford Parish Council's focus is voting for whether Sweetlove House should stay as a community centre, a necessity for the Fields Council Estate, or to be turned into a spa, a luxury for the village of Pagford. The decision has disastrous outcomes. Barry Fairbrother, who dies unexpectedly, is an extremely sympathetic character who is married to Mary Fairbrother. Barry and Mary have no children but Barry's unsympathetic and abusive half-brother Simon Price, who is married to Ruth Price, has two children: Andrew and Paul Price. Simon's son, Andrew, is best friends with Stuart (Fats) Wall who is the adopted son of Tessa Wall, Krystal Weedon's counsellor, and Colin Wall, the Deputy Headmaster at the local school. Fats has a sexual relationship with Krystal Weedon, a resident of "The Fields Council Estate". Krystal is very protective of her younger brother, Robbie Weedon, because their mother, Terri Weedon, is a recovering drug addict. During the series the Weedons get a new temporary social worker, Kay Bawden. Kay has a daughter Gaia Bawden, who Andrew Price gets a romantic interest in. Towards the end of the series Andrew Price and Gaia Bawden get a job at Howard Mollison's delicatessen. Howard Mollison, the unsympathetic Leader of Pagford Parish Council, is married to Shirley Mollison. In the series Howard and Shirley only have one child Miles Mollison, who is a lawyer, is married to Samantha Mollison, who owns a failing lingerie shop. Miles and Sam have two twin daughters, Lexie and Libby. Samantha develops a crush on Vikram Jawanda, a cosmetic surgeon, who is married to Parminder Jawanda, a GP and a member of the Pagford Parish Council. Vikram and Parminder have a silent daughter, Sukhvinder, who says one line in the whole mini-series and that line is: "Whose f***in fault is it then?" after Krystal Weedon tragically drowns, one of her most significant lines in the series raising the question of our responsibility for other. Parminder is good friends with Barry Fairbrother and, like Barry, want to save Sweetlove House, bequeathed to Pagford by ancestors of Aubrey and Julia Sweetlove. Aubrey and Julia Sweetlove want Sweetlove House to be turned into a spa for their own profit. A main theme of the mini-series is the widening gap between rich and poor, The Sweetloves/Howard Mollison vs The Weedons/Barry Fairbrother. The rich (Sweetloves and Howard) want Sweetlove House to become a spa so that they can get more money whereas Barry wants to keep Sweetlove House as a Community Centre because he knows what it is like living on The Fields Council Estate as he, as a young boy, lived there. The story is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's tragedies set in rural Wessex where circumstance and social attitudes are seen as significant contributors to someone's unnecessary death as Barry, unfortunately dies in a rural town Pagford.
Pete Hand
This series made me want to weep - at the senseless waste of acting talent and script material. For this is not a TV dramatization of "The Casual Vacancy" by J. K. Rowling. It's a TV dramatization of the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of The Casual Vacancy. What's more, it appears that slashing it down from a full series to a 3 part synopsis was done after filming already started, probably by the director tearing pages out on the set, rather than by intelligent script writers. How else to explain the presence of all the characters from the book, yet no role - not even dialog - for some of them? How else to explain all the setups in Episode 1 that are just left hanging with no follow-up? What does remain is excellent, completely capturing Rowling's characterizations and the petty snobbery of English village life, but the ruthless editing leaves too much out and too many loose ends. There's no exploration of the interaction between children and parents that is core to the book. There's no hint of who is behind the "ghost", a major plot device. Sukhvinder, who has a life-changing experience in the original, is literally seen but not heard. There's no resolution for the dysfunctional Price family. I don't know why the scriptwriters even bothered telling us Gaia's name, since she's reduced to a walk-on extra.What's left, basically, is an excellent performance from Michael Gambon and Julia McKenzie as the Mollisons. It's worth watching just for that. But that's the tragedy of this series - these are the canonical Morrisons, nobody will ever do it better. And that means the series will never be remade, and the full story will never be told.
labailey-521-460781
I thoroughly enjoyed the book but feel that this adaptation was an utter let down. The book needed very little work to adapt to the screen but instead new relationships were invented and old ones ignored throughout. The original characters were lost, the cast contained good actors but several were miscast, the hallucinations (with Death) were ridiculous. I was really looking forward to this show but I think whoever was in charge utterly missed the point - other than trying to portray real characters, and even in this attempt I believe the changes they made to how characters behaved meant that in the big picture relationships didn't work properly and characters were shallow. They should have stayed true to the book instead of altering nearly every aspect.
Prismark10
JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, a grim adult novel which she wrote under pseudonym looks at life in a small market town of Pagford dominated by grotesque characters like they stepped out of an updated Dickens novel. I have heard it said that the book is also inspired by the play, An Inspector Calls, where various characters in the village are in effect the Birling family who have been responsible to the ruin of a young girl's life.Michael Gambon is the power mad, money grabbing parish councillor who wants to turn a community centre into a wellness spa. Julia McKenzie plays his malicious wife and Keeley Hawes is the flirty but brittle daughter in law. Rory Kinnear is the one who has fought against the closure of the community centre and whose sudden death create the casual vacancy in the parish council and Gambon wants his spineless son to stand and others also wish to contest the seat but a ghost writer on the internet is revealing some home truths.Yet Pagford is not a place just for the haves. Poverty is rife as well as drugs, drink, teenage sex and domestic violence. This is also the story of teenager Krystal Weedon, living with a drug addicted mother and looking after a baby brother with social workers hot on their trail.The three part drama series is a world away from Harry Potter. I know my daughter, a Rowling fan attempted to read The Casual Vacancy but gave up, it was not her kind of book. The series has a bittersweet and grim tone. It is political in context between the haves and haves not, the latter who are getting the rug pulled from under their feet.However the series was not wholly a success, maybe lacking humour, satire and maybe some comeuppance against some horrible people. I believe the ending was changed and softened to make it less tragic from the novel. However I felt that the series would had worked better as a two hours television film and maybe done with being less star studded, Emilia Fox for example was wasted.What is not in doubt is that Abigail Lawrie was outstanding as Krystal.
