Modernizing Ibsen

There are a number of salient differences between conventional theater and film. The former takes place within a finite amount of space and time; the latter can span several continents and take several years to record. These differences, of course, are very tangible to the audience that views both of these different mediums. When one is present in the theater, the physical constraints of acting—of remembering lines, of moving about the stage for hours on end with just a few brief minutes’ intermission in between—are more palpable. Film, for its part, is highly contrived and only features the ‘best’ parts of several takes. Thus, when one considers a dramatic work such as Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, it is considerably difficult to translate all of the nuances and subtleties of this work—which was written for the confinements of the theater—to film. What makes for compelling theater (the intimacy between the actors and the audience, the restricted setting, etc.) does not always make for compelling film. Still, this consideration is all the more reason to respect director Patrick Garland’s film version of A Doll’s House which, featuring Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins, does well to adhere to many of the conventions of Ibsen’s original work.

In discerning the types of artistic and pragmatic choices that Garland chose to effectively preserve the sense of drama and potency of the Norwegian writer’s original work, it is best to consider the overall theme of that work. Ibsen’s play is largely about the suffocation and belittlement of Nora at the hands of 19th-century society—which is largely personified by her imbalanced relationship with her husband, Torvald. That relationship requires Nora to act as though she is just a pretty plaything for Torvald, someone to cook and clean up after their children and make her husband happy. Ultimately, Nora is able to escape this role—which represents her literal and figurative liberation, which is emblematic of a women’s liberation movement that would be realized nearly a century later. The significance of this particular theme is that everything within the play is specifically designed to reinforce and highlight Nora’s entrapment to make her sudden escape that more triumphant and pronounced. 

Therefore, the play’s setting is integral to emphasizing this particular theme. In Ibsen’s original work the entirety of the play takes place within Nora and Torvald’s drawing-room. Except for when Nora goes to perform her dance at her neighbor’s party, the housewife never even leaves the house. This fact merely reinforces how closed-in she feels and how narrow her life is as Torvald’s wife. However, in the 1973 version of this film starring Jane Fonda, this fact is not emphasized as much for the simple fact that there are a few scenes which are shot outside of the house. Nora’s leaving the house is highly symbolic in Ibsen’s original work—it is something that she rarely does (especially without her husband), which is why the play’s ending in which “From below is heard the reverberation of a heavy door closing” (Ibsen) is so significant. This thematic issue is somewhat reduced in the film, due to a couple of instances in which the viewer is privy to scenes and action that take place outside of the house. The subsequent quotation alludes to this disparity between the film and the play. 

The locus of the film remains the comfortably middle-class (and probably overheated) drawing room of the Helmer house, in a small city in Norway over a Christmas weekend. In spite of the excursions outside, the film largely succeeds because (in addition to the fine performances) we experience, along with Nora, the sense of physical confinement, something that comes naturally in a one-set play and is likely to be lost when a one-set play is opened up (Canby).

Despite the fact that this particular critic believes that the physical constraints of Nora’s continued existence in her home is not underscored by a couple of scenes that are outside of the house, there is still a psychological experience of liberty that the viewer effectively gets to experience before Nora does at the play’s ending—largely because of the director’s decision to include external shots as part of the movie.

His reason for including such shots, however, has as much to do with the medium of film as it does the specific work for which he was constructing a particular movie. It is common to have works of drama take place in only one setting and for key events to take place outside of that setting and to have them reported to characters within that setting. However, it is not common for movies to take place in only one setting—even when they are depicting film versions of plays. Another fairly crucial distinction between these two mediums that makes for a different viewing experience for the audience is the usage of the cameras in the movie. Within conventional works of drama in the theater, audiences only have a sweeping view of the stage that never changes. Characters may move about the stage and come to the forefront or to its rear to make profound speeches, but the general angle and perspective of the audience do not change. This steady perspective allows for the intimacy between the audience and the actors. On film, however, there is no such intimacy and the perspective of the audience is readily altered via the angles of the cameras that are selected. The effect of utilizing different camera angles and other technological ‘magic’ actually detracts away from the honest emotion of this particular work of drama. The following quotation suggests this fact. 

My one reservation about the film is also a form of praise: one never forgets for a moment that this is a photographed play. It has to do with the way Mr. Garland uses his camera, cutting back and forth, for example, between a medium close-up of Nora and one of Torvald, in the final scene. The camera too often seems to be meddling in things when it should be content to stand back and let us make up our minds where we want to look next (Canby, 1973).

The trouble with this cinematic technique largely pertains to the nature of Ibsen’s work. This is a straightforward, bare-bones play that was written to emphasize the sheltered existence of Nora. Utilizing various camera angles, and shifting between close-ups and far-away shots, simply does not help to show the simplicity and the fragility of Nora’s existence. These cinematic devices do not necessarily detract from the work of art substantially, however. But it is safe to say that they do not add to it either, nor do the other conventions of movies such as utilizing music or scoring. The same is true of the fact that not allowing the actors to simply perform the work in its entirety in one take does not add to their performance, or to the magnitude of its effect on the audience. It is true that there are other cinematic versions of this film that take even more liberties than the few that this one does in utilizing other scenes and photographic techniques that detract from the play’s substance. However, traditional elements of theater such as a lone setting, audience perspective, and simple manipulations of an actors’ and actresses’ motions and voice are integral to conveying Nora’s sense of social isolation to the audience in the way that Ibsen meant for them to understand it. The audience must understand that the “stagey sense of confinement perfectly serves a story whose whole point is the way society closes in on a housebound woman. The audience must experience Nora’s cabin fever or they won’t feel her relief when she slams that door…in the famous finale” (Appelo). The external screenshots, camera angles, and auditory distractions (music) do not detract from this sense of isolation too much, but they do not add to it, either.

Other than these intrinsic differences in the staging of a work of theater versus that for a film, the other noticeable difference between Garland’s version and Ibsen’s original work pertains to the acting itself. Before deconstructing the interpretation of Bloom’s Nora and Hopkins’ Torvald, however, it is necessary to understand that the actress and the director had a copious amount of success staging and performing Ibsen’s play on Broadway two years prior to the film’s 1973 release (Canby). As such, they were quite aware of the differences involved in shooting a film based on this drama and merely reconstructing Ibsen’s play night after night for theater audiences. As such, it becomes clear that they chose to take certain liberalities in expressing the characterization of the principles within this play. This is particularly true of Bloom’s cinematic portrayal of Nora. In Ibsen’s original work, Nora is imbued with a sense of docility or even outright silliness that makes it quite easy to understand why her husband would seek to confine her to a certain social role that society itself reinforces. She sings, she dances, she is referred to as a songbird and as a “lark” (Ibsen), all of which she willingly assents to in order to construct what is actually a deliberate façade. The fact that she has engaged in pernicious behavior in the past, such as readily lying to her husband and forging her father’s signature for pecuniary benefits, makes her deceit all the more duplicitous and makes her much more of a deplorable figure than how she comes across within the movie version.

However, there is a definite sense of nobility that Bloom conjures forth early on within the play that makes it quite apparent that she is being set up as the heroine—and is worthy of the audience’s respect as a benign figure. This innate goodness about her certainly does not seem to be a quality that Ibsen originally designed for her, which the following quotation implies. “In reading A Doll’s House,... I was disturbed by what I read as contrived characters---Nora always seemed quite the silly doll, even after her transformation” (Lewis). Although one may dispute whether or not Nora still is portrayed as “silly” even after rejecting Torvald and her decision to be a housewife, one certainly cannot argue with the fact that she was insane. She largely lacks this quality in the film, which has a degree of ramifications that subtly detracts from her character. Her transformation from a seemingly innocuous housewife who is only concerned with trifles to the quintessentially liberated woman—conspicuously bereft of obligations pertaining to a husband and children at the end of the play—is no less spectacular, although it is decidedly less pronounced. By portraying a character that is not as blithe she is not as conniving, either. Thus, when she bears the truth to her husband about her deceit, there is less of an evolution in her growth than the way that Ibsen initially wrote her character to be. The subsequent quotation details this slight difference in Nora’s cinematic presentation versus that of the one in Ibsen’s original work.

With Bloom's characterization Nora is presented as being more noble than usual; her habit of lying is played down and we get the sense she is clever and cunningly playing the game of being her husband's "doll." However, the result of this approach is less of an emotional range than I would expect with Nora (Bernabo). 

The fact that Nora’s “emotional range” is more circumscribed in the movie than in the play means that emotionally, cognitively, and (to a lesser extent) physically, she has covered less ground. Therefore the novelty and the significance of her triumph in leaving her husband and her previously restrained life is less dramatic—which tacitly detracts from the importance of the social aspect of Ibsen’s literature. 

However, despite Nora’s importance to this work, one can say that the ultimate effect of her departure depends upon Torvald’s reaction. Hopkins does a credible job in this role, yet the prudent observer may perceive the fact that he plays this role with a bit more sensitivity and understanding than the scripted character in Ibsen’s play. Hopkins is largely portrayed within the play as a typical male chauvinist, a worthy pig if ever there was one. However, in much the same way that Nora is not as ditzy or as devious in the movie as she is in the play, Hopkins’ Torvald is not as impassive and dense in the former as he is in the latter. In all honesty, this is probably a compliment to the legendary Hopkins, who is able to breathe a sense of well-roundedness and completion to what, in Ibsen’s work, was a decidedly two-dimensional, flat character. However, that was the whole point of his role in the play—to represent the stereotypical alpha male figure who took his wife (and the role of women in general) for granted. Thus, Nora’s leaving at the end of the play both shocks him and leaves him emotionally bankrupt. At the time that Ibsen wrote this play, the conception of a woman leaving her husband and family for a life entirely her own was completely foreign. Yet Hopkins’ version of Torvald was less thick-skulled about this incident and decidedly more humane as the following quotation suggests. “…it seems as if Miss Bloom starts off slowly so as to have heights still to attain in her final confrontation with her husband, Torvald, played by Anthony Hopkins with such decency that the husband is less an unfeeling prig than a…wrongheaded lover” (Canby). Again, the fact that Hopkins was able to imbue a degree of completion to the purposefully two-dimensional character of Torvald is a testament to the actors’ ability, which nonetheless slightly changes the significance of the play and impact on the social issues of the day to reflect the social issues of the latter portion of the 20th century. 

In addition to differences in the mediums of a film versus that for a play in which there are more modern techniques of staging, camera work, and audience perspectives of the character, the 1973 film directed by Garland does contain some modern updates of Ibsen’s original work. To the film’s credit, the differences are all fairly subtle, yet they actually result in a modernizing of the work in which Nora is not quite as inane or devious, and her husband is just a tad bit more understanding. The result is that the movie’s ending is no longer as shocking as that of the play—which would have been difficult to duplicate nearly a century later with the progression of the women’s liberation movement. 

Works Cited

Appelo, Tim. “Video Review: A Doll’s House”. www.ew.com. 1990. Web. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,316875,00.html

Bernabo, Lawrence. “Bloom an Hopkins as Ibsen’s Tormented Couple”. Title: A Doll’s House. 2002. Web. http://nzr.mvnu.edu/faculty/trearick/english/rearick/readings/works/drama/a_dolls_house.htm

Canby, Vincent. “Movie Review: A Doll’s House”. The New York Times. 1973. Web. http://nzr.mvnu.edu/faculty/trearick/english/rearick/readings/works/drama/a_dolls_house.htm

Ibsen, Henrik. “A Doll’s House”. www.academicstriton.edu. 1879. Web. http://academics.triton.edu/uc/files/dollshse.html#act1

Lewis, Jone. “A Doll’s House”. www.about.com. 2013. Web. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/men19th/gr/dolls_house.htm