I know most people admire this Mini-Series but to my mind it is trite and superfical,simply wasting the talents of a wonderful cast.Speaking as someone who is anything but prudish,I felt it exploited it's young actresses in spicing up its rather tiresome plot and camouflaging its shortcomings with gratuitous nudity and sex.
Gordon P. Clarkson
I enjoyed it for several reasons but no question, it was "gratuitous."
I agree that it was a plodding, pedestrian miniseries and that it was a waste of a great cast. I think the problem lies in the fact that some books -- those with a lot of interior dialog, for ex. -- cannot be made into good movies bc there's no skillful, subtle way to convey all of that interior stuff.
In this case, the "going to and being at funeral" was a clumsy unifying device, plus it was jarring to try to make the leap from the young characters to their older selves (continually having to pull out a mental cast list and say, OK, that's Polly; that's Oliver; etc.).
The sex scenes: On the one hand, they were integral to one of the themes of the book (that many people live impulsively and intensely under the stresses and uncertainties of war). On the other, I agree that those scenes exploited the two lovely young actresses, and I object to that.
..... If the nudity and sex were so organic, then why did we see so little of Oliver's and Tony's bodies? No man's body was shown in its entirety as were the two women's (for ex., we saw their pubic hair in full-frontal shots, but there were no equivalent shots of the men). So yes, I think the director exploited the women and to some degree used them as objects to titillate. Which isn't surprising, considering his history with women.
"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."