Anne with
an E (initially titled Anne for its first season) is a Canadian episodic
television series adapted from Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 classic work of
children's literature, Anne of Green Gables. It was created by Moira
Walley-Beckett for CBC and stars Amybeth McNulty as orphan Anne Shirley,
Geraldine James as Marilla Cuthbert, R. H. Thomson as Matthew Cuthbert, Dalila
Bela as Diana Barry and Lucas Jade Zumann as Gilbert Blythe.
The series
premiered on March 19, 2017, on CBC and on May 12 internationally on Netflix.
It was renewed for a second season on August 3, 2017 and for a third season in
August 2018. Shortly after the third season was released in 2019, CBC and
Netflix announced that the series was cancelled.
Anne with
an E received positive reviews and won Canadian Screen Award for Best Dramatic
Series in both 2017 and 2018. The series tackled a broad amount of issues such
as orphaning, child abandonment, psychological trauma, social issues such as
pressure for conformity, gender inequality, racism, religion and freedom of
speech.
In 1896,
elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert (who live together as
they never married) decide to adopt an orphan boy to help out around their
ancestral farm of Green Gables, on the outskirts of the Canadian town of
Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. When Matthew goes to pick the child up at the
railway station, he finds 13-year-old Anne Shirley, an imaginative, bright, high-spirited,
and talkative girl, instead. Anne was an orphan when her parents died when she
was a few months old, and lived as a servant in various households before being
placed in an orphanage.
While
Matthew decides he would like for her to stay, Marilla does not trust Anne,
given her status as an unknown orphan and the perceived uselessness of a young
girl. Her distrust appears confirmed when Marilla cannot locate a brooch, thus
leading her to believe that Anne is a thief. The Cuthberts send her away, thus
"returning" her to the orphanage. While she does arrive back at the
orphanage, she is terrified to enter, haunted by bullying she had endured there
and returns to the train station. Meanwhile, Marilla discovers that the brooch
had been misplaced rather than stolen and that prejudice had led her to believe
Anne was a thief. Matthew consequently finds Anne and convinces her to return
to Green Gables, where she is officially made part of their family. However,
Anne continues to face bullying from students in the Avonlea school and class
based discrimination from Diana's parents and others in the community. Anne
once again returns and attempts to gain acceptance by the rest of Avonlea,
using her survival mechanisms of intelligence, problem-solving abilities and
imagination.
Lush, sad and perfect: at last, TV gives us an Anne of
Green Gables for our times
From her red pigtails to the cornflower seas,
everything looks, feels and simply is right in Anne With An E, the exquisite
new adaptation by Breaking Bad writer Moira Walley-Beckett
Chitra Ramaswamy
@Chitgrrl
Fri 12 May
2017 11.53 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/12/anne-with-an-e-netflix-green-gables
Our first
sight of Anne With An E, aka Anne of Green Gables, is on a steam train bound
for Avonlea. Skinny as a piece of string, sharp as a tack, red pigtails, pale
skin, pale eyes, freckle-spattered, with a moth-eaten straw hat and a tatty
carpet bag that has to be carried just so … phew, she’s perfect. A baby cries,
momentarily transporting the orphan traumatised by a lifetime of “never
belonging to anybody” back to her last so-called home, where she was forced to
care for Mrs Hammond’s ever-expanding brood and mercilessly beaten for being
“nothing but a miserable piece of trash”. Meanwhile, the train chugs along the
coast of Prince Edward Island, as much a character in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s
beloved books as New York is in Sex and the City. Low, honeyed light on
wildflower meadows, russet cliffs, cornflower seas and an almost obscene amount
of blossom: it’s as lush and healing as a place can be. And this is a story in
which everyone requires healing.
Everything
looks, feels and simply is right about this exquisite Netflix adaptation by
Moira Walley-Beckett, a veteran writer/producer on Breaking Bad and clearly an
Anne superfan. It takes one to know one. I love Anne of Green Gables,
specifically Kevin Sullivan’s unsurpassable 80s miniseries, like other people
love their children. I spent many hours of my childhood learning Alfred, Lord
Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott off by heart, then attempting to steal boats on
the Thames so I could recite it lying down and pretending to be dead, just like
Anne. I follow Megan Follows (the definitive Anne in the 80s show) on social
media and try really hard not to message her every day. I wanted to call my son
Gilbert.
The
feature-length opening episode, directed by Niki Caro (Whale Rider), is
faithful to both book and miniseries without being straitjacketed by either.
Anne arrives at what she believes to be her new home, Green Gables, after
talking Matthew’s ear off on the long and wondrous ride from the station. Every
detail is spot-on: Matthew’s fond silence, the avenue of wild cherry trees that
Anne says will henceforth be known as The White Way of Delight, the pastoral
peace and ruthlessly scrubbed wooden floors of Green Gables. Here, she is told
by a particularly austere Marilla (the excellent British actress Geraldine
James) that “she’s got to go back” because she isn’t the boy they were
expecting. Cue a mini feminist tract, in which Anne insists that “girls can do
anything a boy can do and more”. Nice touch.
Although
Walley-Beckett brings some of Breaking Bad’s darkness and dry wit to Avonlea,
it’s never at the expense of its essential tenderness. This, after all, is a
story about an ageing brother and sister, so emotionally repressed they don’t
even know it, whose hearts are slowly prised open by an orphan who never shuts
up. Marilla begins by believing “only kin is kin”. Matthew quietly hopes to “be
some good to her”. Yet it is the quintessential outsider who ends up saving
them. Anne, superbly played by Amybeth McNulty, looks a little like a young
Rebecca Hall and is one of those haunting child actors who can actually act.
It’s not easy to pull off a classic line like “My life is a perfect graveyard
of buried hopes” without being annoying. James’s Marilla is just the right
combination of severity and long buried sentiment: her sad, kind eyes glossy
with tears that never brim over.
The second
episode, directed by Helen Shaver (who, fun fact, played Vivian Bell in iconic
lesbian romance Desert Hearts) enters darker territory. Matthew goes in search
of Anne, who has been sent back to the orphan asylum by Marilla after being
wrongly accused of stealing her prized brooch. She fends off all sorts of
jeopardy and is eventually coaxed back to Avonlea, but this 21st-century Anne –
a bit Brontë-ish, a bit Jane Campion – is more damaged and untrusting than
previous incarnations. She suffers debilitating flashbacks that can be triggered
by the sight of a cup of tea, weeps heartily, and lives in fear that she will
be sent away again. Her vivid imagination is less a lovable character quirk and
more the only survival mechanism available to an abused child. “I like
imagining better than remembering,” is how Anne cheerfully puts it.
Anne With
An E ploughs its own furrow, which is just as well because any attempt to
compete with the 80s series would be doomed to failure. Instead, what we have
is a stylish, overtly feminist affair aimed more at adults than children. How
the series will go on to depict such defining moments as the breaking of the
slate over Gilbert’s head – as key to Anne fans as the shower scene in Psycho
is to Hitchcock lovers – remains to be seen, but this, finally, is an Anne of
Green Gables for our times: a darker, sadder, more realistic story about an
outsider’s will to survive.
• Anne With
An E is on Netflix now.
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