Review: ‘Little Dorrit’

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Charles Dickens wrote big, long books, and when his books become movies it’s good to make them big and long as well. His many-tendriled, twisty plots can be pruned and compressed with some success -- orphan meets Fagin, Fagin gets orphan, Fagin loses orphan -- but plot isn’t what makes Dickens great. There are the huge cast of characters (not always engaged in moving the story forward), the splendid set pieces and the passages of social observation that all go into creating a world you can get lost in.

‘Little Dorrit,’ Dickens’ story of money, debt and love in the 1820s -- and whose depiction of a Bernie Madoff-style scandal gives it an eerie currency -- is a very long book. Back in the 1980s, Christine Edzard made a big-screen version that came as two interlocking films, lasting six hours together but telling more or less the same story twice; much was left out. The marvelous new BBC import that begins Sunday night on PBS under the banner of “Masterpiece” lasts eight hours, tells the story straight through and touches most of the novel’s many bases, albeit some quite lightly.

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(Photo courtesy PBS)