Parade's End

Parade's End is a television masterpiece.

You'll be pining for more once it's over. [1 Mar 2013, p.62]

The unfolding of the Parade’s End narrative has been directed (by Susanna White) and written to challenge--sometimes too much so. While you always understand the connections among the characters on “Downton,” you have to piece them together yourself in Parade’s End.... It’s the kind of demanding storytelling that differentiates “The Wire” from most other crime series.

Parade's End must be taken on its own terms, because it is offering something rare and provocative: a poetically precise consideration of what it means to be caught out of time, clinging to the lip of one era or reaching desperately for a foothold in the other.

The disconnect between propriety and reality keeps the miniseries on constant edge. The entire cast is fine, but Hall steals the show.

HBO’S new miniseries Parade’s End won’t stop the “Downton Abbey” DTs. But it can soothe the pain with wonderful visuals and superb performances by Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Adelaide Clemens.

The direction by Susanna White is subtle, except for a too-frequent visual pun of kaleidoscopic, prism-like refractions to help us see that the world at the moment of Parade’s End is splintering into pieces. Cumberbatch pulls off the stoic-to-shell-shocked expressions of Tietjens, Hall is masterful in a demanding role and Clemens is suited to playing the fresh young thing.

Parade's End is often sad and even grim, full of complicated personalities who are more fascinating than likable. But the miniseries is engrossing in its portrait of two people stuck in roles they need to cast aside, but somehow unable to make the break.

Despite character-based faults and multiple narrative cul-de-sacs, [Parade’s End] does come around to revealing the consequences of maintaining public status and reputation at the cost of personal realization.

The series is not easy to follow or instantly love, but it is impossible to dismiss.

Stoppard's storytelling structure has an odd rhythm to it, and White's direction can be both majestically beautiful and transitionally jarring. But combined, their choices allow Parade's End to achieve an exquisiteness, a sense of high art.

While Hall (who plays Tietjens' wife, Sylvia) and Cumberbatch do a fine job of portraying two mismatched people who are nevertheless stuck with each other for a bunch of social, cultural and personal reasons--some of which even they don't understand--Parade's End is often at war with itself.

Sometimes unwieldy, sometimes beautiful, Parade’s End is--like the turbulent new order it ushers in--a bit of a mess, with no easily identifiable good guys. This miniseries doesn’t tell you how to feel, and it’s not exactly bursting with charming, loveable characters. But there’s a poignance to its story of people realizing their orderly parade is breaking up all around them.

Although affecting at times, Parade's End tends to congeal rather than gel.

Despite fine acting from Cumberbatch and especially Hall and rare moments of comic relief, this adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's novels feels heavy and suffocating.

Beyond doubt, great talents and noble ambitions are at play here, but somewhere in the process, those talents seem to have confused "good" with "dull" and "serious" with "tedious.

Snail-paced and difficult to relate to, Parade’s End feels twice as long as its total running time. And yet it’s an exquisite and thoughtful sort of slog, with sound British pedigree and bone structure.