Bill Sikes (Spoiler if you havent seen the last episode)

Acually I agree, this version gave Bill too much of a soul.

"When I light a candle at midnight I say to the darkness I beg to differ"-Sr. Helen Prejean

That is what I remembered too. I think that it is a problem with movie makers of our time that someone (a writer, a producer, a director) wants to explain away the badness of the bad characters. They add to, or take away from the original book to let the audience feel at least a little compassion for that person. I find it quite the interesting dichotomy. We watch these shows. Many people feel that the person in the story is understandable now, and they feel better. In real life, however, there is very little sympathy for a murderer, a rapist, or anyone that has behaved in the same way as the villains in the drama. Reminds me of the difference between an original fairy tale and the one told by Walt Disney. Clean them up, make it all fine in the end, go home happy.

In the book, Bill Sykes not only kills Nancy in the end, but he beat and abused her all the time before that. Tom Hardy got a script handed to him that took all those things out. He may be a wonderful actor, but he wasn't the one that cleaned up the character in order to make people feel somewhat sorry for him.

It was the same thing in his version of "Wuthering Heights". His Heathcliff got quite cleaned up. In the book, Heathcliff becomes so vengeful and mean that, yes, many have called him evil. That goes all the way back to when it was first published. There was an outcry that a book's protagonist would be so vile. The Fiennes/Binoche version did show only what Heathcliff had done in the book. They added nothing to his behavior. When he runs off with Isabella he hangs her little dog at the back of the house. He beats Isabella. Tells her she repulses him. How many of you would sympathize with a husband who treated his wife that way these days???

In the second half of the book, he is cruel to his own son Linton. To Catherine he locks her in the house at the Heights until she will marry Linton so that he (Heathcliff) will get the Grange land. He is absolutely bent on getting revenge on the Lintons because Cathy married Edgar. He blames them for his separation from Cathy and ultimately her death. He takes out his revenge on Hindley by keeping his son Hareton a "brute" (to quote the book). He won't let him be schooled and taught to read and write and do numbers. Uses him only to work the land and animals of the Heights. Would anyone have felt much sympathy for Heathcliff in a teleplay that kept all those things in it? Would very many people out there feel pity and sympathy for someone in real life, here and now, whose bad deed had ONLY been the hanging of the dog, never mind the rest?!?

So, Ralph Fiennes had a script that included all those things. And I think that he still managed to show us his wounded soul. Did we sympathize? Maybe not. But he did make us feel his pain. Just as the book does. Did we come to understand that a lack of love and affection makes for an emotional cripple? I think so.

BUT . . . Will we learn to feel sorry for real people like the rapper (DMX?) in Phoenix, AZ who kept dogs for illegal dog fights, and then starved some, and strangled others that he wanted dead. NO!!! Is the man evil? You answer that!