Product Review

Hard Times (Charles Dickens) (DVD)

This extraordinary production captures the soot and smoke that blot out the sun in dank, industry-choked Coketown. Local MP and schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind (Bob Peck) raises his children, Louisa and Tom, in the utilitarian fashion, stressing reason and fact and dismissing imagination and emotion. Under his influence, Louisa grows cold while Tom turns to a secret life of drinking and gambling. To be nearer her brother, Louisa accepts an offer of marriage from his boss, the self-made, self-important banker Josiah Bounderby (Alan Bates), though she does not love him. But soon she finds herself succumbing to the attentions of the Casanova James Harthouse (Richard E. Grant). As Louisa faces a life without love and Tom's fate begins to turn even darker, will Gradgrind begin to realize the imperfections in his philosophy of rational self-interest?