Movie Review: Pride & Prejudice
With the BBC's 1995 miniseries of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" setting the gold standard for this often-told saga of straight-laced Regency passion and longing, yet another screen version of the novel seems a frivolous thing indeed.
The five-hour adaptation starred Jennifer Ehle as spunky Elizabeth Bennett and Colin Firth as the haughty Mr. Darcy and was a marvelous movie that gave full rein to the novel's pastoral rhythms of rural 19th-century English life and to the maddeningly coy dance of romance performed by its properly repressed young lovers.
And while the newest version of Pride & Prejudice (complete with modern ampersand) by director Joe Wright feels sharply truncated by comparison, it nevertheless delivers a sprightly, pared- down, Cliff's Notes interpretation of the painstakingly deliberate story.
It's one that might serve well as a painless introduction to Austen for a reading-resistant, attention-challenged generation of younger moviegoers.
The new Pride & Prejudice features red-hot Keira Knightley (in a far cry from her last punkish turn in Domino) in a demure but still spirited performance as Elizabeth, second of five sisters in the threadbare, middle-class Bennett family.
Bright and outspoken, she must endure the desperate, prattling efforts of her social-climbing mama (Brenda Blethyn) to marry off her daughters to suitably well-to-do suitors.
The screenplay by Deborah Moggach is quick and sleek as it pares down several scenes and plot threads and eliminates some characters while giving the whole thing a vigorous, youthful blush. That it does so without doing great damage to Austen's genteel satire on the English class system and its treatment of women is a surprising bonus.
The picture benefits greatly from lavish production values that show off the gorgeous Empire costumes, regal manor houses and lush parochial countryside to good effect and from "Masterpiece Theatre"- worthy performances by a typically strong cast of British thespians.
Hunky Matthew MacFadyen strides through brusquely in the role of the snobbish, glowering Mr. Darcy, and Simon Woods does a modest, likable turn as the shy but rich Mr. Bingley.
Rupert Friend gives off appropriately smarmy vibes as the cruelly opportunistic Mr. Wickham, while the estimable Judi Dench does a full-out diva's turn as the imperious social arbiter Lady Catherine de Bourg.
As the sorely put-upon Mr. Bennett, father of a household full of twittering women, Donald Sutherland makes a sly but richly humorous impression before retreating to his book-lined study.
Knightley has seldom been given material with this sort of classical heft, and she handles it neatly with an appealing mixture of old-world dignity and modern, youthful sass.
If hardcore Janeites are taken aback by the slightly irreverent undercurrents of Wright's Pride & Prejudice, they should feel a cozy sense of pride that Jane Austen's gentle, witty love story has the timeless durability to hold up to such a compact, contemporary interpretation without sacrificing a whit of its elegant literary manners.
Quality: * * * (on a scale of zero to four stars)
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