Jane Austen fans will love this youthful, fresh investigation of the story but in addition to that, the film is thoughtfully faithful to the novel’s themes and to Austen’s style, which makes it elegant, romantic and completely charming. It has won four Oscar nominations…
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Keira Knightley, Donald Sutherland, Judi Dench, Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Matthew Macfadyen.
(127 min.)
- Keira Knightley is nominated as Best Actress
- Sarah Greenwood has been nominated for Art Direction
- Jacqueline Durran has been nominated for Costume Design
- Dario Marianelli has been nominated for the Music Score.
Do we need another “Pride and Prejudice”? The 1940 version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier is an absolute gem, as is the 1995 BBC-TV series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. There have also, over the years, been 8 other TV versions. One might imagine that there is no new cinematic thought to be had about this venerable classic. It was, after all, written in 1813. What can a book written 193 years ago possibly have to say about love and marriage to the “Bridget Jones” generation? The answer to that is “everything”. Austen’s novel is about three young women trying to retain control over their own lives and happiness. They are fighting to achieve a sense of self-esteem and purpose. They are hindered by their families and the social values of the day which entrenched the rights and dominance of men in their culture. That made it impossible for women to make free choices. For young women to work and be independent would be a scandal for which they would be ostracized. In the marriage market a woman’s manners, morals looks, and child-bearing ability could be scrutinised and discussed publicly as if they were cows at auction but any man who shows an interest in marrying them, is welcomed without question, no matter his age or how hideous he is, as long as he can give her money a home and a place in society.
It was a brutal world for intelligent, independent women and within it Jane Austen was a proto-feminist. Back in 1813 when Austen herself was a spinster of modest financial means and no social standing, she knew everything there was to know about how the world’s dice were loaded against women. That’s why this book is about a mother so desperate to marry off her daughters that she will shove then into the arms of anyone who asks, even a handsome rascal or an odious bore. It’s about women who must choose to go in dull, loveless marriages because it’s better than becoming spinster dependent on the charity of others. It’s also about the tragedy and terrible choices that faced clever, gifted women if they want to avoid a life of dingy dependence. For them marriage was seldom about love. There were mergers made for reasons of status and mobey. The story offers us three young women, Lizzie Bennet (Keira Knightley), her sister Jane (Rosamund Pike) and her best friend Charlotte (Claudie Blakely), who must make those tough choices.
They all live together in a small rural town that is set upon its ear by three male visitors. There’s Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) a wealthy man who rents the stately home of Netherfield for the summer. He has a friend, the reserved and haughty Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) and the third visitor is an obsequious social climber, a country parson Mr. Collins (Tom Holland). Every mother in the district decides that her daughter will marry one of these three. Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn) a pushy, vacuous woman mounts a campaign to secure these men for her daughters and the resulting intrigues are sufficiently well-known. The freshness and originality of the film lies in the interpretation of young director Joe Wright, who makes some dazzling choices, like casting young actresses who are the same age and the girls in the book. This has never been done before and it brings a youthful emotional energy to the film.
Wright also decides to show us that the Bennet family is far from rich and are perched on the edge of a social decline. He shows this in the film’s very first shot. Lizzie Bennett is returning from a pre-breakfast walk. She wearing sturdy boots and the hem of her dress is muddy. The Bennett barnyard is in disarray and as she enters the house we are struck by the genteel shabbiness and disorder of the room. The point is obvious. The Bennett’s are broke. They may have social position but their father Mr. Bennet (Donald Sutherland) lacks business acumen and personal drive. He’s a lazy, self-involved man who will retire to his library to read while his livelihood and his estate slip into chaos around him. Sutherland’s performance is superb. He reveals the indolence and selfishness of a man who has given up on life. It’s easy to make this character into a comic figure but Sutherland makes him darker and sadder, a man whose life is falling apart but he has neither the energy nor the will to do anything about it.
It is no wonder that their mother (Brenda Blethyn) is so obsessed with finding rich husbands for her daughters. It would be easy to play her for laughs as well, but at her naïve and foolish level of understanding, she is in despair and she is motivated partly by her own desire to have a daughter who might support her in her penurious old age, but at some level she also wants her daughters to make a better marriage than she did. Deborah Moggach’s acutely witty script script and the intelligent cast constantly reveal the irony and cool, hard-edged sophistication of Jane Austen’s moral view. No previous film has put misplaced pride, social snobbery and the issue of money so precisely at the centre of the story of “Pride and Prejudice”, even though that’s where Jane Austen always wanted it to be in her novels.
Keira Knightley does her best screen work to date her as the vivacious, intelligent Lizzie, who can see how dire her situation is and how awful her family can be but her loyalty, generosity and self-esteem temper all her actions. She makes us feel how sad it would be if a woman of her spirited temperament were forced to fit into a polite marriage to dull man. Knightley is Lizzie Bennett to the life but while she has the lion’s share of the film, she is not it’s only star. Austen created one of her most sublime comic figures, Lady Catherine de Bourg, a woman of great wealth and extreme snobbishness who married for wealth and status. Her only joy in life is to praise herself and to insult others. She’s the ultimate example of the tragedy of a marriage of convenience, a woman with great strength of character who was forced to squander herself as a trophy wife to man who never cared for her as a woman.
Judi Dench is striking in this role, hitting every note of vanity and spite that this nasty old bat has to offer. Dench’s look is also an indication of the intelligence of this film. She alone wears her hair in the pompadour style of the previous century. Her clothes are magnificent but they are 30 years out of date. She’s decked out in the grand style of a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough, a poignant display of a woman hanging onto her lost youth and beauty with all the tenacity that money and pride can inspire. She’s like a pantomime dame in the presence of all these fresh, young girls in the simple delicate fashions of the new century and for all the high comedy that Dench produces, there’s this core of anger and spite, the price she pays for a life bartered for status and material possessions.
The rest of the cast are all gloriously young, with Rosamund Pike as Jane reminding us exactly why that old cliché about “the perfect English rose” was coined. As Mr. Bingley, Simon Woods is delightful, a lively, spontaneous fresh-faced youth who strives for the grand manner of a wealthy landowner but rapidly collapses into his natural youthful high spirits. The only performance about which is was not wholly certain was that of Matthew Macfadyen who plays the haughty Mr. Darcy. He has the right, rugged, glowering look but he does an interesting thing. He suggests that the formality of Darcy’s manner is actually shyness. He’s unsure about how to handle women, so he has retreated into the pose of despising them all as a silly creatures, which is a safe place to be, but when he meets one who is intelligent, well-read, and articulate, with a natural grace and spirit he’s scared out of his wits. He’s convinced himself that all women are fools but when he finds one who is not, he feels foolish himself and blunders his way into trouble. It’s an interesting reading but Matthew Macfadyen is perhaps too formal and understated to give the right romantic flourish to the ending. He’s more Heathcliff than Darcy.
That said the film is a joy, quite different from Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” which remains the best, most completely engaging and truest screen treatment of an Austen novel. But Joe Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice” runs it a close second. He has a sound visual sense and the skill to pull this kind of historical drama off to perfection. I sincerely hope he keeps working in this period genre because a Joe Wright version of “Wuthering Heights” or “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” would be something to look forward to.
Republished with permission from Barry Ronge, South Africa’s #1 movie critic. Please visit his movie review website Rather Ronge
This charming comedy is like a teen romance for serial singles and newly-created divorcees. It’s about loneliness, unguarded passion, self-doubt and adult awkwardness but it’s not self-pitying in a wrist-slitting sort of way. It affirms that there are emotional support systems that we sometimes choose not to see, because we are too proud or too scared and it reminds us that there are many ways to love and some rather odd ways to be loved in return. It’s quite profound but in an hilarious way.
