***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew MacFadyen, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland, Tom Hollander, and Dame Judi Dench
Directed by Joe Wright & written by Deborah Moggach, from the novel by Jane Austen
2005
127 min PG
Adaptations of Shakespeare and Austen run the risk of having characters who, to paraphrase “Amadeus,” “look like they defecate marble.” (Ang Lee’s stuffy “Sense and Sensibility” comes to mind.) But part of the fun of the surprisingly charming and effervescent new “Pride and Prejudice” is how dirty and lived in it is. Clothes are cruddy, livestock are afoot, hair is perpetually frizzy and falling out of ponytails, and everyone looks like she smells bad. And the whole movie is this lively.
I read “Pride and Prejudice” a couple months ago and, honestly, didn’t have a lot of fun with it. Like many doorstop-sized great novels from the 18th and 19th centuries, stuff just keeps happening and happening. I don’t mention this as a complaint but simply to highlight how difficult adaptation can be. In fact, director Joe Wright has the least amount of fun with the plot points of the first half of “P&P”—just bits of business to get out of the way. Then we’re deep in a minuet or a saraband (no waltzes; this “P&P” moves the setting back a few decades to the 1780s) or some other dance of happy, laughing, sweating English country gentry. That’s when Wright has a blast, breaking out the Steadicam and treating us to long, continuous tracking shots from one end of these grand country houses to the other. Characters weave in and out, and possibly the best throwaway bit is when Darcy almost confronts Lizzy Bennett, then just scoots off into a corner. De Palma would be proud.
Either you know the story, or you don’t. Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen play Lizzy and Darcy, the young lovers who are mean to each other because they’re frightened by how much they’re attracted to each other. “Pride and Prejudice” succeeds in making these two young people palpably drawn together, with the heavy breathing and the stupid blank eyes. He’s rich and arrogant, she’s poor and arrogant, and they’re both young and think they have all the answers. They don’t. As in so much Austen, a love story is a vehicle for these young people to discover that their morality isn’t as moral as they thought it could be, and that it’s time to revise. She’s fiery and perpetually stifling sarcastic observations, while he is so dour and miserable at every social occasion that you get the feeling he would just as soon every drop dead as look at him. McFadyen gives a delightfully British under-performance in which his simple lack of expression for the first half of the movie is a stroke of genius.
They’re surrounded by one of those able-bodied British supporting casts beloved by the art house crowd. Darcy’s friend Bingley (Simon Woods) is a grinning happy dope, instantly in slack-jawed love with Lizzy’s older sister Jane (Rosamund Pike of the most recent 007 movie). Bingley’s sister (Caroline Reilly) is a conniving bitch out to separate them. Lizzy’s parents are almost a movie within a movie; a detached, philosophical father (Donald Sutherland) paired with a boorish, desperate, and often insensitive matchmaker (Brenda Blethyn). Lizzy is pursued by a cleric (Tom Hollander) who seems to suffer from constipation. She is besieged by Darcy’s aunt (Judi Dench), who sits atop the ridiculous class structure. For all her pomp and arrogance, unintentionally reveals it for the glorified hazing that it really is.
In the end, “Pride and Prejudice” may not be enormously different than, say, “Emma,” “Mansfield Park,” or any other romance in Empire (rhymes with “pier,” not “pyre”) waists. It is muscular, confident, and energetic, with lovely photography and some fine acting. It’s no “Amadeus” or “Barry Lyndon” but, then again, who said it had to be?
Finished Sunday, December 18th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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