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Thursday, November 24, 2005

"Pride and Prejudice" review

I'm brewing a post about Psalm 2, as Kristen and I are going to kind of meander through the Psalms together (all are welcome to join us in this, by the way! This means you! Right, Kristen? We're not some kind of exclusive Blogging the Psalms club with a secret handshake or anything....) But before I do that post, I wanted to sort of empty from my brain into text all the stuff that's rattling around in there about the new version of "Pride and Prejudice", which I went and saw today.

Yes. I. In a movie theater. With two girlfriends. On the first day of wide release. SO MUCH FUN. Wish you were there. (There were only about ten other people in the theater, so that was nice too.)

First, I have to just say right up front that of course this is only a two-hour movie and so they couldn't tell the whole story in lavish, subtle, beautiful detail the way BBC did in 1995. BBC's edition still reigns as the authoritative adaptation, surpassed only by an actual reading of the book for Austenish pleasure. That is sort of the overarching truth of this review, and it's something that is just assumed in every phrase of the rest of it. I didn't want to sound either too critical or too glowing in my review, but I don't want to say that about every point either, so just keep it in mind.

OK, I'll start off with something that was just different without being necessarily good or bad. It's almost similar to the Rozema adaptation of Mansfield Park, the way the filmmakers took the story and sort of blew a whole different feeling into it. The way I put it to my friends today was that it was as if Tchaikovsky had written a variation on a theme by Vivaldi or Mozart. You have this light, satirical, effervescent, witty story which is oh yes by the way a romance (the original book); in this movie, the satire is blunted, the bubbles are turned into more standard Hollywood funny moments, and the romance takes position as the front-and-center raison d'être for the film. This is... well, you can't complain about it without complaining about the entire movie itself; you just have to accept that that's the premise of what happened, and see it as a different view of the same events. The musical analogy is a good one, I think; this is a Romantic retelling of a Classical story. Or, as a friend told me before I watched it, they made it more Brontë-ish than Austen. I don't know if I'd go THAT far -- there were no wives in attics or bleak moors or gnashed teeth -- but I definitely see her point. I must add that in the past, this would have ruined the movie for me -- this 'reinterpretation' rather than 'direct retelling' approach. I don't know why, but I'm more tolerant of this sort of thing than I once was. It doesn't mean I think it's OK when, say, Kevin Sullivan combines characters and shifts their lines around and alters his characters' entire personalities to suit his film-making preferences. One has to draw a line, after all. But I can accept this sort of reinterpretation more readily than I once did, putting it in a similar category to modern retelling of myths, or, say, the movie "Clueless".

Now for some things that I thought were, well, bad. Negative. Took away from my enjoyment of the story.

• DONALD SUTHERLAND. I'm sorry, but this man did NOT come across positively to me at all. His Mr. Bennet was a sad, defeated, tired old man. There was very little humor in the character, and that's a crying shame, because Mr. Bennet is probably the most humorous of the sympathetic characters in the novel. He's self-deprecating; he sees the folly of his situation as a man who married a pretty girl who became a shrill, annoying woman; he finds pleasure in absurdity because it provides a diversion for him. I didn't see this in Sutherland at all. He just came across like a depressed guy who had a really bad hangover most of the time. There were glimmers -- but only occasional ones -- of the man Mr. Bennet is, but overall, eh. Poor choice, in my opinion.
• Modern language. I don't think Elizabeth Bennet would have used the phrase "what you're going through," nor do I think Mr. Darcy would prate on about "our relationship". I could be wrong. Those could, I suppose, be direct quotes from the text. But they certainly rang a false note for me, along with half a dozen or so similarly anachronistic phrases.
• Of course (see above) they had to chop the story a good deal to make it fit in two hours. Things that happened separately happened together, that sort of thing. It pains me to see things like that, but I understand that it has to happen. Why, though, do they cut out so many secondary characters? There were no Mr. and Mrs. Hurst; no Maria Lucas; no Gardiner children; no Aunt Phillips; no Denny and Carter and Sanderson. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
• Some of the casting choices (besides Donald Sutherland who deserves his own section above) were wack. I had a hard time watching Mr. Wickham (who got WAY LESS screen time than his character should have, even so), for example, and Mrs. Gardiner was far too old.
• They rather senselessly changed the times and things of lots of events. Lady Catherine shows up in the middle of the night. Darcy proposes at dawn. I suppose this was done to add to the appearance of urgency each felt in his or her mission, but I didn't like it. I didn't like the way Darcy and Elizabeth met up at Pemberley, but maybe that's partly because that's my absolute favorite scene in the BBC version so I'm biased.
• The whole second half of the movie is quite rushed. Very little time is given to Lydia's situation; Lydia is the one to tell Elizabeth that Mr. Darcy paid for everything, rather than Lydia letting it slip that Darcy was there, and Lizzy writing to her aunt Gardiner for details.
• Oddly, some of the scenes -- dreary ones especially -- seemed dragged out much longer than necessary. The ball at Netherfield, aside from Elizabeth's dances with Mr. Darcy and Mr. Collins, is nearly humorless and is painful to watch, and especially the dinner portion seems neverending -- which I suppose gives us a hint of what Elizabeth may have felt, but ehh. still. There were other scenes similarly dealt with that I thought might have been trimmed. But then, I'm not a multimillion-dollar film director, either, so what do I know.
• Lizzy herself is altered. She's more bookish and less -- not fiercely, that's the wrong word -- less archly independent. She feels more passion for Darcy, earlier on, than she does in the novel. She's more passionately and verbally angry at him, less reserved, than I think she would have been.
• I think they dropped the ball with Miss Bingley. I was looking forward to seeing what they did with her, because she's one of the few sore points in the BBC version. She's supposed to be pretty, and charming in a traditionally feminine way, not just supercilious and conniving -- although she's supposed to be those things too. So I was hoping they'd do handle her a bit better in this new adaptation, and at first I thought they had -- she is prettier than Anna Chancellor -- but she wore the exact same bored expression through every scene she had. Eh. And there were very few moments that showed how much she wanted Darcy for herself -- moments that just make her character.
• I could be wrong but I think they used a modern piano rather than a period-correct pianoforte for the internal music.
• Initially I really disliked Matthew McFadyen as Darcy. He grew on me a bit, but I never did really get used to him. He lacked the intensity that I thought Darcy should have, and (through no fault of the actor, probably, in all honesty) you never really got a good sense of his struggle not to fall for Lizzy.
• NO MENTION OF FINE EYES.
• Several lines were added/scenes were changed; this goes along with the two paragraphs above. But just as one small example, Lizzy and Jane are both eavesdropping on Darcy and Bingley when Darcy says the bit about 'tolerable' -- and she lacks the laughing bravado which she has in the novel (and the BBC version) in that scene; she's hurt and she shows it. She does later cast the line up to him in a possibly-Lizzyish-but-totally-invented way.

That's all the complaining I'm going to do for now, although I may think of things to add later.

On to the list of things I really enjoyed about this movie -- in some cases, even more than the BBC version (sacrilege!)

• MR COLLINS. David Bember did a fantastic job for the BBC, don't get me wrong, but I think maybe the guy in this one did a TEENY bit better. Less oily, but just as obsequious, and short. Mr. Collins has many of the laugh-out-loud moments in this movie. His expressions are priceless, his timing is totally perfect, his appearance is spot-on. He reads Fordyce to them, just as he does in the book.
• The dancing was amazing in most of the dancing scenes. It was more boisterous, more energetic -- the people who were dancing really looked like they were enjoying it. The speech between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy during the infamous dance at Netherfield was very well-done.
• Mr. Bingley was SO nervous and geeky and just generally totally and fumblingly and obviously in love. There wasn't that air of almost-smugness he seemed to have -- just because of his expressions, I think -- in the BBC version. This was VERY nearly carried too far -- Jane can't marry a clown, after all -- but not quite.
• I think the Focus version is more generous to Mary than the BBC version was. It was like they felt there had to be a truly ugly sister for that adaptation, and they made Mary far more disagreeable than the book has her. The 2005 Mary was much more like the book's Mary: a girl who's a bit awkward, and not AS pretty as her sisters, who takes refuge in her books and music, thinking that they will put her on an equal level. She doesn't have to be a prissy little toad with repulsive manners to accomplish this.
• As I mentioned, this movie is WOW pretty. It's not that the BBC one wasn't nice-looking -- at least they'd shed The BBC Look by then, ugh -- but this has a much more Hollywoodish look to it -- more lush, better lit, better camera angles, that sort of thing.
• Kristen will like this: Mrs. Bennet is less over-the-top shrill than she is in the BBC version. It took a while to get used to that, but once I did I kind of appreciated it.

All in all -- Austen fans don't need to be afraid of this movie, I don't think. I enjoyed it more than I thought I might -- in fact, really, I enjoyed it quite a lot. It certainly won't replace the BBC version in my affections (duh) but I might want to own it when it's available to complete my collection, and for occasional viewing. I'm even glad I paid the $6 to see the matinee in the theater, rather than waiting for DVD.

Comments

Posted by: Kathy at November 24, 2005 05:05 AM

Posted by: debi at November 24, 2005 07:06 PM

Posted by: jenn at November 24, 2005 08:41 PM

Posted by: jenn at November 24, 2005 08:42 PM

Posted by: Kat with a K at November 24, 2005 09:39 PM

Posted by: Kristen at November 25, 2005 06:29 PM

Posted by: laura at November 25, 2005 10:04 PM

Posted by: Muley at February 7, 2006 01:52 PM

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