![Bill Nighy as Johnny Worricker and Rachel Weisz as Nancy Pierpan in Page 8 [watch].
Johnny: What are you doing?Nancy: Looking for the next great novel. They don’t seem to understand that feelings are interesting but the world is interesting, too.
The Times’ Alessandra Stanley faults screenwriter David Hare for not—surprise!—exonerating the security establishment:
The image of America as a blundering bully who betrays even its closest allies in pursuit of an invented enemy stretches from Graham Greene and John le Carré to the romantic comedy “Love Actually.”
[…]
There was little hope that this time [Hare’s] warmongers’ duplicity and ill will would serve as a red herring: a denouement that exonerates the Oval Office, 10 Downing Street and the Mossad would be as shocking to contemporary British fiction as the “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” was to detective novels in the 1920s.
To a degree, I can see her point—it would be more twisty-turny if the allegations, and not ‘just’ the characters’ survival, were in doubt. But this also exemplifies a prejudice in the criticism and teaching of contemporary character-driven drama, both on screen and on the page, that I take issue with: that more tension, more doubt, amped up pressure right to the very end, is inherently better drama. Page 8 to me is satisfying because a few things are as they seem (if anything, its good folks are too good); and it’s spot-on true in its portrayal of power. Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” cuts equally the other way; there is no Mossad or MI5, only people doing as, as “folks will do.”*
*cf Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: “When you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there — showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lueezpmV481qa0rqvo1_r1_500.jpg)
Bill Nighy as Johnny Worricker and Rachel Weisz as Nancy Pierpan in Page 8 [watch].
Johnny: What are you doing?
Nancy: Looking for the next great novel. They don’t seem to understand that feelings are interesting but the world is interesting, too.
The Times’ Alessandra Stanley faults screenwriter David Hare for not—surprise!—exonerating the security establishment:
The image of America as a blundering bully who betrays even its closest allies in pursuit of an invented enemy stretches from Graham Greene and John le Carré to the romantic comedy “Love Actually.”
[…]
There was little hope that this time [Hare’s] warmongers’ duplicity and ill will would serve as a red herring: a denouement that exonerates the Oval Office, 10 Downing Street and the Mossad would be as shocking to contemporary British fiction as the “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” was to detective novels in the 1920s.
To a degree, I can see her point—it would be more twisty-turny if the allegations, and not ‘just’ the characters’ survival, were in doubt. But this also exemplifies a prejudice in the criticism and teaching of contemporary character-driven drama, both on screen and on the page, that I take issue with: that more tension, more doubt, amped up pressure right to the very end, is inherently better drama. Page 8 to me is satisfying because a few things are as they seem (if anything, its good folks are too good); and it’s spot-on true in its portrayal of power. Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” cuts equally the other way; there is no Mossad or MI5, only people doing as, as “folks will do.”*
*cf Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: “When you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there — showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”
