Movie Review |
The Fine Mismating of a Him and Her: Pride and Prejudiceby George Sax |
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The new movie version of Pride & Prejudice is probably the most luxuriantly sensual of the several screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel of manners, morals, the marriage market and social status. I’m not referring to the by-now infamous last scene of love that’s been added from out-of-nowhere in the version released in the States (and not in England and Europe). I mean the richly detailed, handsomely rendered settings, both in and out of doors. Joe Wright’s movie manages to be both lush and naturalistic. The evocation of Regency England by designer Sarah Greenwood and Wright, assisted by cinematographer Roman Osins, is alluring but convincing.
One aspect of the film’s visual appeal slightly weakens its impact. Keira Knightley’s impersonation of Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is at least a trifle incongruous by virtue of the young actress’s striking, fine-boned, knockout attractiveness. Elizabeth makes her forthright way through the novel, and the film, by her articulate intelligence and critical capacity. Knightley’s glamorous appearance threatens to undermine or overwhelm this depiction of Elizabeth’s character.
When her volubly anxious mother (Brenda Blethyn) tries to genteelly hawk Elizabeth’s elder sister on the marriage mart by pointing out that “My Jane is considered the beauty of the county,” our reflexive response is to look around for Knightley, and then wonder at the mistake.
This miscasting is no more than skin deep, however. Knightley makes herself into a plausible-enough Elizabeth. Yale critical eminence Harold Bloom has written that he walked out of a lecture at Cornell once when novelist Vladimir Nabokov called Elizabeth “insipid.” Bloom finds her wit richly ironic and seductive. (In this he is in accord with her creator. Austen told her sister she didn’t know if she’d be able to tolerate anyone who didn’t find Elizabeth at least interesting.)
And of course it’s her honesty and intelligence that incite admiration and romantic feeling in Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen). The reluctant offer of marriage by the vastly wealthy, defensively prideful Darcy, and its angry, resentful rejection by the socially marginal Elizabeth are the crux of the story.
If much of Austen’s novel is pointedly amusing, this clash of temperament, breeding and purposes is meant to get to the heart of the matter, and the hearts of both the characters and the reader. For it’s made increasingly obvious that Darcy and Elizabeth are more simpatico than either of them thinks remotely possible. They both operate out of a difficult combination of decency and skepticism.
Of the two performers, Knightley has more success rising to her challenge. Macfadyen is initially so reserved as to suggest catatonia. He eventually begins to convey some sense of a rational individual and rises toward the role’s requirements, but he never quite achieves a portrayal of someone who is man enough to be Elizabeth’s companion. He seems too befuddled and clumsy for someone painfully aware of his high station in life, but willing to transcend it to win this girl’s hand.
This is, as noted, a superior production in physical terms, and it’s more faithful to its source than the only other two versions I’m familiar with, last year’s silly Bollywood-style Bride and Prejudice, and the 1940 MGM film, which this one scarcely resembles. That one was more stylized and broadly humorous, but it had Laurence Olivier’s Darcy, a man of touchingly vulnerable hauteur. Olivier’s performance was more entertaining and coherent than Macfadyen’s.
Which brings us to the notorious new American ending, rightly decried as out of keeping with the novel and most of the movie. It’s actually not just a case of one scene throwing the film off its track. There are several minutes of progressively more soft-headed stuff to prepare the way for the final, sappy ending, of which both Bloom and Austen would disapprove.
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