Pride and Prejudice: a brief note

Taken as a stand-alone film, the new Pride and Prejudice is quite charming; taken as an adaptation of Jane Austen, this sex-drenched romance fails quite badly.  There's plenty of gentle comedy, but little of Austen's trademark irony--and, of course, without the narrator, the events lose much of their complexity.  While the film plays up the marriage market, it doesn't really convey why matrimony is such an urgent matter for these women--not even in the case of Charlotte Lucas' sudden engagement to the pitiful Mr. Collins.  The script insists on the sex, pig testicles and all, but we only fitfully see that the Bennet's literal survival depends on the more mercenary aspects of a "good" marriage.  For that matter, the sex carries over to the scenery, which seems intended at times for Wuthering Heights (misty landscapes, gnarled trees, etc.) and spliced in here instead by mistake.

Acting-wise, the leads, Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen, are charming and unobjectionable, especially Knightley (who is, nevertheless, probably too conventionally pretty); MacFadyen leaves less of an impression, despite his quasi-barechested moment near the end.  Brenda Blethyn flutters engagingly and at length as Mrs. Bennet.  Probably the most interesting performance, however, comes from Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennet: reticent, softspoken to the point of mumbling, and almost entirely hidden away from his flock of females. 

One of the film's cleverer motifs involves doors.  We know that the Bennets violate the normal bounds of propriety because they are forever eavesdropping; even Elizabeth eavesdrops on Mr. Darcy's sister as she plays the piano.  But doors also invite the film's audience to position itself in relationship to the plot's privileged social circles: a door opens to reveal the country ball, and shuts to lock us out when Mr. Bingley returns to town.  It's not quite as though we are asked to think of ourselves as taking the same social voyage as the elder Bennet sisters, but there certainly are momentary links between their sense of inclusion or exclusion and our own. 

Comments

[Rebecca]

I was disappointed that Wickham was so opaque in the movie...viewers without a knowledge of the book have no sense of his character, why he acts in such a dastardly fashion, or why his "elopement" with Lydia is so beyond the pale.

I also thought that Keira Knightley is much too skinny to be Lizzie Bennet. :)