The 2004 BBC adaptation of My Family and Other Animals (first published in 1956) by nature writer/conservationist (and television benign nature personality) Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) appeared on PBS's "Masterpiece Theater" in 2005. The DVD has the opening and closing "Masterpiece Theater" stuff, but no introduction.

Not that there is any need for one, 'cause this is in the familiar endearingly eccentric Brits (very much at home in the other side of the Channel within Barbara's writeoff) abroad genre. Not just a family of English eccentrics, but the quirky "natives" who become a part of their household from the perspective of a ten-year-old born in India and miserable in the cold and damp of England before his widowed mother a sister and two very ill-matched brothers decamp to Corfu.

I assumed the father was a casualty of World War I. That would have presented a major obstacle to Gerald having been born in 1925, but in the tv movie neither his age nor the year in which they arrive in Corfu is clear (or I missed the data?). Durrell père died in 1928 in fact, a whole decade after the end of World War I.

The book is divided into three parts corresponding to the three villas which the family occupied. Finding a house with bathrooms is puzzlingly difficult to the mother of the brood, Imelda Staunton who is considerably more benign than she is in the Harry Potter movies and more confident than in her Oscar-nominated turn as "Vera Drake." She is more conventional than her children, but that leaves quite a lot of room for running an unconventional household! Her philosophy of parenting is "if you can control your family, you've gone terribly wrong somewhere."

At first Gerald (Eugene Simon, who also played the young Casanova who metamorphosed in Heath Ledger) explores the flora -- and especially the fauna -- of the island in colorful sweaters ("jumpers") and wading boots. I'd say that he "runs wild," except that he captures creatures great and small (including magpies and an owl and many scorpions and beetles) and turns his room into a zoo, the stench exacerbated further by the dead animals he stuffs.

Gerald has the good fortune to meet and be accepted as a junior colleague by a local naturalist, Dr Theodore Stephanides (Chris Langham). Gerald is less lucky in the succession of tutors who attempt to interest him in history, literature, or mathematics. One of them (Tom Goodman Hill, also an alumnus of the Harry Potter franchise) is far more interested in Gerald's provocative sister Margot (Tamzin Merchant).

For older brothers, Gerald has the aesthete Lawrence (1912-1990), future author of the Alexandria Quartet (the very attractive Matthew Goode from "Match Point" and the new "Brideshead Revisited" and, unrecognizably, as the chief (and very American) thug in "The Lookout" in between) and the bluff would-be Great White Hunter, gun-crazy Leslie (Russell Tovey, who played Rudge in "The History Boys").

The family has the protection of a burly Greek with a huge convertible, Spiro (Omid Djalili), who returned after a sojourn making money in Chicago and a cook (Olga Tournaki) beset with aches and pains who in one scene shows how slow it is possible to slice a zucchini.

There is not really much of an arc to the 84-minute teleplay, though it begins and ends with voyages by boat. I guess that there is an arc of the romance. "My Family and Other Animals" is more a sitcom with some Greek eccentricities and more English eccentricities.

One odd aspect of Gerald Durrell's memoir is that although his eldest brother Gerald went to Corfu at the same time as the rest of the family, he was married and did not live with his natal family. Gerald eliminated the wife and installed Larry with the rest of the family (in their three Corfu houses). Moreover, Lawrence remained on Corfu when his siblings and mother left (and famously moved on to Egypt during the war, and then to Belgrade (see White Eagle Over Serbia

Although Lawrence was the writer of the family (though encouraging Gerald to write, which is reflected in the movie), his account of the pre-war Corfu years, Prospero's Cell (1945), has not had the recognition that Gerald's book has -- or that Lawrence's book about Cyprus, Bitter Lemons (1957( has had. (Lawrence Durrell also wrote a book about the Greek Islands (1977) and one about visiting Sicily about which I have epined, Sicilian Carousel (1978). Gerald Durrell, BTW, produced two sequels to My Family and Other Animals: Birds, Beasts and Relatives (1969) , and The Garden of the Gods (1978) along with many other books (a total of 37, I think).

There are no DVD bonus features (not even a "Masterpiece Theater" introduction, as I already noted).

And though the sun beats down on Corfu as much as on Kos, these (already much-travelled) Brits in the 1930s enjoyed themselves a lot more than the German soldier protagonist of Herzog's Signs of Life, the other aliens on a Greek island movie about which I wrote today!

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes