How Alias Grace soft­ens Mar­garet Atwood’s source novel

A dif­fer­ent role for Net­flix has emerged this year, as it asserts even more dom­i­nance over how we access TV – col­laps­ing the geo­graph­i­cal bor­ders between sto­ries, and even inter­ro­gat­ing their place in nation­al iden­ti­ty. The stream­ing giant has start­ed to col­lab­o­rate with pub­lic broad­cast­ers of cer­tain coun­tries. They have part­nered with the Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion twice this year, on Moira Walley-Beckett’s Anne With an E, and now an adap­ta­tion of Mar­garet Atwood’s 1996 nov­el ​‘Alias Grace’.

Both pro­duc­tions are in a rare and intrigu­ing posi­tion, tak­ing pop­u­lar sto­ries and his­to­ries from the coun­try, that form some part of its iden­ti­ty, and attempt­ing to rein­vent them. Anne With an E is a com­ing-of-age sto­ry that holds a sen­ti­men­tal place in this writer’s heart, a con­nec­tion forged through var­i­ous adap­ta­tions (par­tic­u­lar­ly those from the 1980s star­ring Megan Fol­lows as the girl of Green Gables). Walley-Beckett’s ver­sion drew ire for dar­ing to be revi­sion­ist and any­thing oth­er than rose-coloured, show­ing the more bru­tal real­i­ties that sim­mered behind Anne’s sun­ny opti­mism in the books.

And now there is Alias Grace, which seeks to illu­mi­nate the scars of the past anew, bring­ing a sto­ry about a sin­gle loss of inno­cence for a coun­try to the world. Yet too often the show seems at war with itself – is it a soft­er, more con­ven­tion­al dra­ma, where hor­ror lurks behind con­ve­nient­ly closed doors, or a piece of shock­ing­ly bru­tal truth telling?

Direct­ed by Mary Har­ron and writ­ten by Sarah Pol­ley, Alias Grace is a six-episode series char­ac­terised by the com­pet­ing visions of its cre­ators. The facts of the sto­ry, based loose­ly on true events, are straight­for­ward enough. Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon) has been jailed for over a decade, now being hired as a maid/​curiosity at the near­by home of the Gov­er­nor. A band of well-wish­ers want to have her par­doned and released for the bru­tal mur­der of her for­mer lord (Thomas Kin­n­ear, played by Paul Gross) and lady (Nan­cy Mont­gomery, played by Anna Paquin) of the house.

Her sup­port­ers wish to see her proven as men­tal­ly ill and inher­ent­ly able to do such a thing, so they hire Dr Jor­dan (Edward Hol­croft) to inter­view Grace as she keeps up with nee­dle work. But over the years, Grace’s sto­ry has been rewrit­ten by the pub­lic (“They seem to know my sto­ry bet­ter than I know myself”) as a series of pro­jec­tions at every turn, and she’s per­sis­tent­ly eva­sive, return­ing to her child­hood as an Irish immi­grant and her abu­sive father to recap­ture her own his­to­ry. ​“What­ev­er I said would be twist­ed around,” she says.

Alias Grace has been a dream project for Pol­ley since she was 17. It was at that age that she came out a short hia­tus from act­ing to star in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Here­after, anoth­er film about indis­cre­tions hid­den under pure snow. It’s her vision that often emerges as the more effec­tive, unset­tling­ly lurid behind con­ven­tion­al soft­ness and laced with sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. Grace’s sto­ry is told in flash­backs, and thanks to Gadon’s depth and Polley’s writ­ing, they often feel like Dr Jordan’s con­struc­tion and attempt to rec­on­cile a mount­ing record of sto­ries with truth.

Polley’s writ­ing creaks with a hor­ri­fy­ing under­ly­ing dirt, blood and bile, a grue­some­ness hid­den beneath put-togeth­er speech, slammed doors, and hand­made quilts that emerges with a gasp, a scream, and a slash. Floor­boards creak under the weight of what they hold. An ear­ly high­light comes in a mono­logue in which Grace mus­es on the many bright­ly pat­terned wed­ding quilts she has washed, fold­ed and then spread over beds, and why they are sewn. She set­tles on them being a fore­warn­ing, a cry for help, because for women beds are, as she puts it, ​“mere­ly an indig­ni­ty they must suf­fer through.”

But while the blood is almost ooz­ing out for Pol­ley, Har­ron has already applied the gauze. The latter’s vision is a piece of mas­ter­piece the­atre, a soft­er and con­ven­tion­al peri­od piece that pure­ly leaves it at that with­out play­ing with view­ers’ expec­ta­tions about the medi­um or the sto­ry. Too often her direc­tion is too man­nered, at odds with the vio­lence of the writ­ing. The soft images don’t rat­tle with the jux­ta­posed bru­tal­i­ty with­in them. Instead they min­imise the impact of what is hap­pen­ing. Despite the flinti­ness of Gadon’s per­for­mance, it is Harron’s unqual­i­fied soft­ness that ulti­mate­ly blunts the series and results in a strug­gle to hold inter­est after the open­ing episodes.

It’s dis­ap­point­ing, because Alias Grace had the poten­tial to be an anti­dote to the Amer­i­can-cen­tric depic­tions of hard­ship we so often see in main­stream tele­vi­sion. There are ref­er­ences to the Cana­di­an rebel­lion, upris­ings of the low­er class­es that took place in 1837 and ​’38 against the monar­chist gov­ern­ments, some­thing that is rarely heard about out­side the country.

Where The Handmaid’s Tale bom­bas­ti­cal­ly tells its own cau­tion­ary tale, Alias Grace is more sub­tle. Rights don’t exist yet here, injus­tice is hap­pen­ing every­where. When there is noth­ing, how much more can be tak­en away? Why do we tell these sto­ries? To com­fort, to make them be heard, but most impor­tant­ly, by way of cau­tion. A line at the start of episode two sums this up neat­ly: ​“Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speech­less. Till some ques­tion­ing voice dis­solves the spell of its silence.”