Benighted remake

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2005)

In Austen speak, I can but hope that the circumstances in which I found myself during the film did nothing to bring ill favour upon my good opinion of it. The blue rinse brigade talk more in the cinema than your average teenage hoody. "Who is that?", "his cousin" , "look at that dress", "oh, a pig". At least you can threaten kids. Any filmmaker that wants to make The Great Octogenarian Chainsaw Massacre will get my ticket stub. As it turned out, there was plenty to irritate by the film's own account.
My main curiosity in seeing P&P again is whether it could possibly live up to my favourite scenes in the 95 Beeb production. Liz bennet's blistering refusal of Darcy's proposal and Lady Catherine De Bourg's incendiary assault in the apple orchard. As for the former, Darcy's opening words were drowned in thunderclaps. That's it, let's not bother with the dialogue. It's not important in an Austen production. IT'S THE TEMPEST OF THEIR INNER FEELINGS!!! Go, director. GO BABY! As for the latter, let's cut Lady Catherine's classic punchline. Who needs it?
This version is curiously under-populated. It's use of passing light and shadow, mirror reflections and window blurrings suggests love as a waking dream of anticipation and uncertainty (no surprise when Darcy's big scene occurs at daybreak.) Although Austen's P&P has been said to be a comedy of manners, love as a moral force, in its ultimate sense as sacrifice, must also be of equal importance. The Wickham affair is central to it as Darcy is prepared to seriously humiliate himself before this man in order to win his true love. Without this he appears out of focus in the film, and the film without true gravity.
The cast is okay although Hollander and Knightley appear to be using a certain production as a crib sheet. After the failure of Thunderbirds, perhaps hard nosed economics was the motivation behind Working Title's remake. Whether fair or not, that's why you leave the picture not really caring.