“I should worry, not for nothin’
Everybody loves me, yes they do …
I feel just about ten feet all, havin’ a ball
Guess ya might call me a Pollyanna.”
—Doris Day (1958)
If I do, it’s probably not a compliment. “Pollyanna-ish” has entered the English or at least the American language as a derogatory epithet suggesting syrupy sweetness combined with a brainless smiley-face cheeriness, an implied insult to those who experience genuine pain–which means, all of us–and who respond to it with appropriate rage or anguish. Tell me I’m being a Pollyanna, and I’ll probably make an effort to explain to you why what I’m saying or doing isn’t Pollyanna-ish at all.
But who was Pollyanna?
It isn’t a question I’d given much thought to until a few weeks ago, when my wife Rose came home with a DVD of the 2003 British TV-movie version of Pollyanna, which aired the following year in this country on Masterpiece Theatre. We were completely captivated by the film–one of the best, we both thought, that we’d ever seen–and sufficiently intrigued to get hold of Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, the children’s novel that started it all.
Porter’s novel was published in 1913 to stunning commercial success. The TV film is set in the same year, but with the action transferred from rural Vermont to England. This shift was no doubt made for the benefit of the all-British cast. But it also hints at a dark shadow beneath the happy (more or less) ending. The wedding scene, at which we discover that Pollyanna can walk again, will have taken place in the spring of 1914. A few months, in other words, before Britain and the rest of Europe were plunged into the pit of horror that used to be called “the Great War,” until eclipsed by another war even greater and more toxic.
In this poisoned atmosphere of a poisonous century, how will Pollyanna’s “glad game” thrive?
It’s always hazardous to read a book after seeing a movie based on it. You can’t escape visualizing the characters as looking like the actors who played them on screen; and, for me at least, it was hard to keep straight which incidents or bits of dialogue that I remembered as being in the book were really there, and which I’d projected into it from the film. (The 2003 film stuck fairly close to the book–much closer, I gather, than the 1960 Walt Disney Pollyanna starring Hayley Mills, which I haven’t seen.) I also found myself measuring the book against the film, and thinking that the book fell short.
The story, with the obligatory SPOILER ALERT, is this: Pollyanna, played in the film by the marvelous Georgina Terry, is an eleven-year-old orphan. Her father having just died–“gone to heaven to be with Mother,” the little girl puts it–Pollyanna is taken in by her spinster Aunt Polly (Amanda Burton), who doesn’t much want her but thinks it her duty to give her deceased sister’s child a home of sorts. She will discharge this duty but as grudgingly as possible. Although she’s rich and lives in a lavishly furnished mansion, she sticks Pollyanna in a barren, ugly attic room, stifling in the summer heat. Left there alone for the first time, the child throws herself onto the narrow bed and weeps.
She’s got resources, though. Her late father, an impoverished vicar with gloriously loopy ideas about money, taught her to play “the glad game”–whatever happens to you, dismal as it seems, you can find something to be glad about in it. The Ladies Aid Society gives you a pair of crutches when you wanted a doll; you can be glad because you don’t need the crutches. Pollyanna explains this to Aunt Polly’s maid Nancy (Kate Ashfield), who’s taken a shine to her from the beginning. In light of what’s going to happen to Pollyanna, this example of the “glad game” turns out to be cruelly ironic.
Impossible not to like this radiant child, easily wounded by the grownups’ coldness and stupidity yet with the gift of not taking them too seriously. At least, in the movie it’s impossible not to like her. The Pollyanna of the novel is a bit preachy, a bit saccharine. But screenwriter Simon Nye had the brilliant inspiration of making the character not only wise and kind-hearted but, in her innocence and naivete–she hears an eccentric neighbor has “a skeleton in his closet” and she takes this absolutely literally–funny as well.
The novel Pollyanna is, in spurts, inspiring. The film Pollyanna is, much of the time, hilarious; and, paradoxically, this makes it all the more inspiring.
It opens with a close-up shot of a buzzing fly. The creature is at once dispatched by Aunt Polly, who proclaims triumphantly, “Dead fly!” whereupon the groaning Nancy must hurry in with a bucket to remove the corpse; this, we’re given to understand, is a staple of life in Aunt Polly’s home. The novel alludes to her distaste for flies but it’s left for the film to transform this crotchet into comic cinema. Our first impression of Aunt Polly: what a completely ridiculous person!
And, having laughed at her, we can’t hate her as much as we might otherwise.
Aunt Polly will change in the course of the movie, from a “cross old stick” as Nancy describes her, to a soft and beautiful woman, loving and ready to be loved, by her niece and by handsome Dr. Chilton (Aden Gillett), who was her lover long ago and has never gotten over her. (When Porter wrote in 1913 about people being “lovers,” did that have the same meaning as in 2003? I suspect not.) The transformation is largely due to Pollyanna, which is in the book as well but it’s the movie that shows it in a really convincing way. But in the meantime Pollyanna has undergone a transformation of her own.
She’s been hit by one of those newfangled devices called “motorcars,” leaving her bedridden, paralyzed from the waist down. For the first time, her “glad game” fails her. Overhearing her aunt say she’ll never walk again, she can only scream at the horror of what’s befallen. Offered a teddy bear for comfort, assured that things will look better in the morning, she shrieks, “This is morning!” She hurls the bear at a precious chain of prisms, hung in her sickroom to bathe it in rainbows, shattering it and the rainbows with it.
Will the rainbows return? Will Pollyanna recover? Dr. Chilton thinks she has a chance; and she spends the winter (in London?) undergoing some sort of experimental treatment, returning in the spring for her aunt’s wedding to the doctor. There she hobbles down the church aisle, first with the crutches she once didn’t need, then holding on to the pews, then without any support. All faces, watching her, shine with happiness.
Of course there’s no guarantee she’ll ever run again, with the careless grace that was once so appealing. The “glad game” doesn’t promise that things will work out even remotely your way, only that you’ll be able (more or less) to bear it when it doesn’t. And that the love that surrounds you can buoy you up, if you’re open to receive it.
In this final scene, Nancy is pregnant. She’s been wooed and won by Aunt Polly’s shy young handyman Tim (Tom Ellis) in a wonderfully comic romance of which there’s not a trace in the novel, and which makes Pollyanna’s goodness easier to swallow by taking some of the attention away from it. Before the summer’s over and the baby’s born, Europe will be at war; surely Tim will be sent to fight. (And Dr. Chilton also sent to the front, to attend to the wounded?)
Will Tim die in the trenches? Or return crippled, like Pollyanna, with or without a “glad game” to sustain him? We don’t know. For the moment, the moment’s sunshine is all that counts.
Which may be the message of Pollyanna. In which case, being Pollyanna-ish may not be so bad after all.
by David Halperin
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