A Simple Twist Of Fate

"A Simple Twist of Fate" is the kind of title you might find on a Victorian novel about dark secrets, incredible coincidences, love versus jealousy, and the sins of the father being visited upon the daughter. In other words, just the kind of novel I like to read.

Modern novels don't work up the same energy, because their characters don't take sin and guilt seriously enough. Today's fictional heroes do in a paragraph what the Victorians spend 500 pages living down.

The point is, though, that they are Victorians, living in the last century among fears and mores we no longer possess. When you take a Victorian story and plop it down in the 20th century, as "A Simple Twist of Fate" does, you get a strange interruption of the rhythm - as if the characters are dancing to unheard music. They do things that are inexplicable unless you realize they're living according to the codes and cliches of the last century.

Steve Martin's screenplay for "A Simple Twist of Fate" is based on Silas Marner, George Eliot's 1861 novel about a poor weaver whose life is destroyed by a false accusation. He becomes a reclusive miser, hoarding coins. Then his treasure is stolen, and he is inconsolable, until a little golden-haired girl wanders into his life. He takes the girl as heaven's repayment for his lost gold, and adopts her. Years later, it is revealed...well, let's not get into that, as it will come as a surprise to anyone who hasn't read the novel.

Victorian melodrama has a strange appeal for me, probably because I'm attracted to the tension between the repressed characters and the wild swoops of plot. (The Anne Rice novels duplicate this tension by giving us vampires living according to the strict practices of an earlier age.) In the modern world, alas, we're playing without nets, so it's hard to believe a Silas Marner could exist today.

In the movie, Martin plays Michael McCann, a high school choral teacher whose wife cheats on him, a development George Eliot might not have anticipated. He moves to a rural area and sets up as a cabinetmaker, investing all of his earnings in gold coins which he buys from the local antique dealer (Catherine O'Hara). His evenings are spent alone with his hoard.

Meanwhile, a local blueblood named Newland (Gabriel Byrne) wants to run for office. His life is complicated by his ne'er-do-well brother, a drunk and philanderer, who after a tragic car wreck breaks into McCann's house, steals the coins, and lurches out into the night. Meanwhile, a local woman, the victim of drug addiction, staggers out into a raging blizzard with her small daughter. She passes out in the cold, and the little girl wanders into Steve Martin's cottage. When the mother is found, frozen and unidentified, Martin determines to adopt the girl, and...