Magic acts

The Mists of Avalon comes to the small screen

by Clea Simon

THE MISTS OF AVALON. Directed by Uli Edel. Teleplay by Gavin Scott, based upon the novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley. With Anjelica Huston (Viviane), Julianna Margulies (Morgaine), Joan Allen (Morgause), Samantha Mathis (Gwenhwyfar), Caroline Goodall (Igraine), Edward Atterton (Arthur), Michael Vartan (Lancelot), Michael Byrne (Merlin), Hans Matheson (Mordred), Mark Lewis Jones (Uther), and Ian Duncan (Accolon). Airs on Turner Network Television July 15 and 16 from 8 to 10 p.m. (it repeats at midnight each night, then airs again July 20 at 8 p.m., July 21 at midnight, and July 30 at 8 p.m.).

Julianna Margulies, Joan Allen, and Anjelica Huston

What if the world's great stories were rewritten from the women's viewpoint? What if the mothers, lovers, sisters, and aunts of the fighting men told their side of our epics, in the bedroom and kitchen small talk that makes up domestic life? And what if those dramas took place in a time when the battle of the genders was even more pitched than it is at present? That's the concept behind The Mists of Avalon, the bestselling 1984 novel that has finally been brought to television, as a four-hour mini-series that TNT will show in two parts this Sunday and Monday.

Recasting the Arthurian romance as a story of its women, Marion Zimmer Bradley's grand fantasy used the traditionally secondary characters of Igraine (Arthur's mother), Morgause (his aunt), Morgaine (his half-sister), and Gwenhwyfar (that's the Welsh spelling of Guinevere, his wife) to tell the story of King Arthur's Camelot. Seen from their eyes, the real story is about not battles or the quest for the Christian Grail but the changeover from Goddess-worshipping Celtic society to Romanized Christianity in the face of the Saxon invasions that racked Britain after the fall of Rome.

Weaving together older mythologies and rituals, Bradley added guts to the usual sword-and-sorcery fare of fantasy mediævalism. In her Britain, the Goddess appeared as death crone as well as nubile young woman, and much of the legend's usual Camelot gloss was played down. (Arthur, for example, is not resting to arise at some future time, like a Monty Python parrot. Morgaine makes no bones about the fact that this king is dead.) The result was a sprawling romantic feminist epic, a bodice ripper that gave its primarily female audience juicy characters with whom to identify.

Even a four-hour television special forfeits much of the richness of the 876-page novel. Most of Igraine's struggle between fidelity to husband Gorlois and her priestess sister's prediction that she must conceive Arthur with the new high king, Uther Pendragon, is skipped over. Without the hundreds of pages of build-up and explanation, Gwenhwyfar's condemnation of the old religion comes across as the whim of a peevish girl. And entire subplots -- such as the involvement of Accolon, Morgaine's lover -- are touched upon but never developed. Perhaps director Uli Edel and teleplay author Gavin Scott feared they couldn't eliminate these characters without alienating Bradley's fans. Perhaps they simply distrusted viewers' ability to comprehend the book's more complex morality, the battle taking place for Britain's soul.

But the women of Mists carry this film, much as they do the book. Joan Allen (as Morgause) and Anjelica Huston (as the priestess Viviane) both chew the tapestries gloriously. Their characters, alas, are secondary here to Morgaine, Arthur's half-sister and the mother of his child, the evil Mordred. Played by former ER star Julianna Margulies with a pleasantly mild, vaguely British accent, Morgaine is lush, sensuous, and "dark as a Pict," as the book dictates. To discredit her by noting that she lacks Huston's majesty, or even the older actress's wit, is unfair, though when the two appear together the comparison is difficult to avoid. In her monologues -- or when playing against the men -- she has the power to pull off this pivotal role. The men, as might be expected, have lesser roles. Still, Ian Duncan's Accolon is adorable and Hans Matheson's Mordred blatantly reptilian with his greasy braids and greasier glare.

What this special loses in plot detail, it tries to replace with visuals. Tattoos are true to the book and give an appropriately tribal look, as do the clothes and hair (I suspect many weaves), and Mordred's battlewear is to die for. The film was shot around Prague, whose castles and forests create an opulent mediævalism that's a lot more pleasant than, for example, The Name of the Rose's frigid dripping of Scotland (which might have been closer to the truth of Bradley's setting). When the mists roll into Avalon, distancing it farther from the increasingly Christian world, the effect, even on a small screen, is magical.