David Lynch’s historical drama is compassionate, unsettling and well worth the tears, with John Hurt giving Merrick a life beyond other people’s pity. Its faith in good manners can be too simple; the performances make the sympathy convincing.
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man earns its tears, though it sometimes makes decency look too easy to recognise. Its account of John Merrick’s treatment in Victorian Britain is disturbing and carried by two performances that never seem anxious to impress. Lynch wants us to notice how readily interest in another person becomes an inspection. We recommend it warmly, with a reservation about how often good manners are allowed to settle difficult questions.
John Hurt gives Merrick an undemonstrative dignity, and the performance is persuasive because he does so little to advertise it. We were moved by his composure: the quietness with which he carries himself makes other people’s attention feel intrusive. Hurt leaves us room to imagine what Merrick thinks of the people studying him, without supplying an emphatic response for every feeling. He makes politeness feel like an effort, with thoughts behind it that remain his own.
Anthony Hopkins, as Frederick Treves, is equally important to that effect. His subtlety stops Treves becoming the reassuring figure through whom we can feel pleased with ourselves for caring about Merrick. There is enough reserve in the performance to make us watch the attention he pays, and to wonder what it means to Merrick. The friendship works because neither actor insists on making every exchange a declaration, and because Hurt can hold our attention without competing for it.
Freddie Francis’s cinematography makes the Victorian setting feel oppressive without treating every image as an instruction to shudder. There is pleasure in looking at these pictures, which is an uncomfortable sensation in a film about the harm done by looking. Stuart Craig’s production design gives the gentility and the squalor enough presence to make the society around Merrick matter. The setting can feel close to horror, and that helps: respectable surroundings offer little reassurance when the people within them are being scrutinised this carefully.
Anne V. Coates’s editing deserves credit for how readily we settle into the conventional shape of the story. The telling remains clear even when the atmosphere grows strange, and the performances have enough room for their restraint to count. We find John Morris’s music less consistently helpful, sometimes too insistent about feelings that Hurt has already made clear. We would have welcomed more trust in the actors at those moments, especially when their quietness is doing so much.
The screenplay by Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren and Lynch is less searching about the standards by which Merrick is judged. It places considerable weight on his gentleness and good manners, and can make his claim to consideration seem tied to his ability to reassure other people. That is too easy a test of anyone’s humanity. Hurt complicates it through the care and restraint of his acting, but we wanted the writing to leave more space for a Merrick who might be awkward, impatient or angry.
Respectable historical dramas can leave us feeling pleased that we know better than the people on screen. Lynch makes that pleasure uncomfortable, and his use of horror’s unease is more valuable here than another speech about kindness would have been. There is enough tenderness to make the film accessible, though we would hesitate to call it comforting. Watch it without distractions; Hurt is doing too much quietly to compete with a phone.
