Summary 
Videotaped BBC version of the misanthropic tragedy benefits from an uncut text, an effective lead performance, and strong supporting acting, but is sometimes listlessly photographed with a static camera. A serviceable rendition of a challenging drama, told as a likeable young hero is devastated by a lack of personal loyalty with Biblical proportion.
Production
Directed by Jonathan Miller. 2:07. BBC Television & Time-Life Productions. 1981.
Cast
John Fortune (Poet), John Bird (Painter), Jonathan Pryce (Timon), John Welsh (Flavius), Norman Rodway (Apemantus), Geoffrey Collins (Flaminius), Terence McGinty (Servilius), John Shrapnel (Alcibiades), John Bailey (Sempronius), Hugh Thomas (Lucius), James Cossins (Lucullus).
Analysis
Jonathan Miller's uncut video version of Timon of Athens for the BBC's "The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare" begins 1.1 with an eye-level, always-shifting camera that captures the various groups of guests at one of young Timon's banquets. Jonathan Pryce's almost child-like Timon - curly-haired, bearded, often smiling, and always eager to please - seems intent on purchasing loyalty and buying friendship, and Miller dwells on the applause and laughter that follow his acts of generosity and humorous remarks. After a close-up of the martial Alcibiades, also greeted with applause, and the warnings of Apemantus (the "unpeaceable dog") spoken directly to the camera, action shifts 1.2 to a Biblical - if ponderous, at nearly twenty minutes - 1.2.
With Alcibiades at his right hand, Pryce's Timon lords over the 1.2 table as if Jesus at the Last Supper, ushering his friends within the room, then drinking from a chalice he then passes among them as Apemantus notes the flattering friends but "dip their meat in one man's blood." Miller then presents a series of shots of the men eating and drinking in close-up as Timon happily watches but, pointedly, does not feast himself, his plate empty as he selflessly directs servers. The scene bogs down with repetition as a third course is served and a group of six dancing girls enter as entertainment, wearing Spanish battle helmets but wearing ballerina-style white costumes. Apemantus continues his direct-to-the-camera criticism ("we make ourselves fools") as Pryce's Timon joins the dancers, then bestows jewels as gifts to his guests - "a token of our love" - giving away riches like nothing and strewing coins to them through the air. As the party moves off-camera, Miller pointedly reveals the greed of the populace as the now-seated dancers suddenly spring forward and scrabble on the floor for loose coins.
Miller glides through the second act, revealing Timon as gravely in debt to the consternation of the old accountant and Steward, Flavius. Miller cleverly juxtaposes Alcibiades with three hunting hounds against Timon with a group of three debt collectors ("give me breath!") as Flavius then reveals to Timon the folly of his hyper-generosity, although Price's Timon - "sermon me no further" - remains reluctant to worry or panic: "I am wealthy in my friends." But with the third act, in which Timon suffers a series of three Christ-like denials from his friends, Miller's camera slows to a stop and he favors long uninterrupted scenes shot by a static camera. 3.1 cuts from Timon to his servant Flaminius in medium close-up before a long hallway, pacing next to Lucullus, who paces away from the camera and up the hall while devising his excuse to not come to Timon's aid. When Lucullus stalks off away from the camera, Flaminius flings the offered coins back at him and races after, railing at the supposed friend in a long shot, disappearing from view, then stomping back toward the camera and past it, the shot never changing. Similarly, 3.2 is shot from a single angle, with the studious Lucius working at his desk in a small chamber, bemoaning to Servilius his inability to offer Timon a loan even as he inadvertently knocks a pile of coins from the desk. Servilius, in disgust, exits even as Lucius continues to address him. And in 3.3, Sempronius gorges himself on bread and cooked fowl, ludicrously telling Timon's servant that he is insulted at being Timon's "last refuge" when should have been "the first man." His resounding "no," also filmed from an unchanging angle, comes as the man gnaws greedily on a game bird leg.
The rest of Shakespeare's third act, after Timon emerges coatless in a rage to strike at his creditors, then begins to plot against his supposedly loyal colleagues - "bid all my friends again" - and the subplot with the angry Alcibiades summarily banished for support of a friend (arguing from the background as a large group of unmoved senators mill about in the foreground) concludes with 3.6. After a close-up of Lucullus and Lucius, both deliciously guilty and ill at ease, but continuing to make excuses and fabricate reasons for their lack of loyalty, Pryce's Timon emerges collarless and awkward to usher them into another feast. With his dozen apostles attired in robes with a white-collar fringe, the bare-necked Timon seats them and offers a prayer before they notice the water they are served in earthenware pots. Timon then moves from man to man, spooning water over their heads in rising hysteria until they all rise and flee, and Pryce's Timon descends into shouting rage, smashing the pots and overturning the banquet table. The powerful moment - "thou detestable town!" - is the finest in the film, as Timon stares off over the camera before his 4.1 flight from Athens.
After a brief 4.2, in which the downhearted Flavius disbands Timon's servants, Miller presents a 4.3 that is at once his most strikingly artistic camera shot and his most artlessly directed scene. Pryce's Timon kneels on a beach in monochromatic stark white moonlight, all color bleached to make the shot startlingly crisp black-and-white. Pryce's bitter misanthrope moans, his head back in close-up, then digs in the gravel-like sand to find hidden gold coins. Naked except for a white wrap around his waist, and already scarred from exposure to the seaside elements, Timon groans in medium close-up within a Miller shot that never shifts perspective and only briefly changes focus. Pryce's performance is compelling but the interminably long scene lacks potency, playing like a simple series of bland confrontations, first with Alcibiades and a pair of ghastly prostitutes, then with Apemantus, then with a pair of wandering thieves, and finally with the weeping Flavius. At last Timon moves, standing to embrace his former Steward before sending him back to Athens.
Miller's somber fifth act limps to its conclusion with few cinematic touches. After Timon shares a root with the Poet and Painter in 5.1, he hides within his rocky cave, and when approached by the senators in 5.2, Miller's camera finds Timon from the neck up, but upside down and in shadows within the cave ("I was writing of my epitaph") as he refuses to come to the aid of the city that so injured him: "be Alcibiades your plague." Miller depicts Timon's passing with little drama - just a 5.3 grasping of sand by a withered hand - and 5.4 concludes the production with a suddenly colorful shot of Alcibiades' triumphant meeting with a group of Senators as well as Lucullus and Lucius. Alcibiades throws down his glove against the city but relents to a more merciful tone when he hears of Timon's demise. The closing image is one of Miller's best, with Alcibiades taking old Flavius gently by the arms, then the loyal Steward in close-up reaching down to rest his hand upon his former master's bitter epitaph. The conclusion, like Miller's entire production, is thoughtful and well-acted, quite serviceable if decidedly lacking in cinematic vigor.