Not what I had hoped it might be.

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2005)

I'm trying to think of a delicate way of saying how much I won't be buying it when it comes out on DVD. Visually, it was stunning. Though one wonders why so few members of the cast seem to have been allotted a hairbrush. Perhaps they spent so much on livestock for this production that, in the end, they found they could only afford one. What a pity it wasn't shared.
Some of the acting was superb. Judi Dench was magnificent, as always. But then, I truly believe that woman could give a compelling reading from the phone book. Matthew Mcfayden was a sultry, nigh-Heathcliffian Darcy. Tom Hollander made a creditable Mr. Collins with what little he was given. Donald Sutherland had me welling up when he did. And Tallulah Riley was the most sympathetic Mary Bennet I've ever seen.
But as for Keira Knightly's interpretation of Elizabeth Bennett As I told a good friend, I shall not soon be inviting Ms. Knightly to tea. Though, I would willingly strap her to a chair and feed her a pie. Like Gwyneth Paltrow before her, Ms. Knightly seems to have gone to extremes to make her Austen heroine look as underfed as humanly possible. Ms. Paltrow, however, at least played Emma truer to character than Ms. Knightly did Elizabeth. (I feel bad about that too, as I really did like her in Love Actually and Pirates of the Caribbean.)
She was just so unsubtle. She displayed a tongue-behind-her-teeth grin, and an irritating propensity to giggle that was far more like Lydia than Lizzy. While she didn't come off as stupid, she did come off as far less acerbic and discerning than the Lizzy of the book.
My other issues are that (for the sake of time) certain scenes were combined that should not have been, it changed the tone of some of the key encounters. Charlotte's getting angry with Lizzy was unexpected and out of character. I spent much of the movie having no idea which girl was Lydia and which one was Kitty, as little was done to distinguish one from the other until "the infamous elopement". Some of the language was, in my opinion, dumbed-down too much, supposedly for the sake of modern audiences. Certain things that Lizzy said were far too modern. (And really, who did they think would be seeing this movie anyway?) Lizzy declaring to her father that she had been completely wrong about Darcy was nonsense. A big part of the book was Darcy's transformation; he really was a pompous, posturing ass in the beginning.
And what on Earth was that scene at the end!? I half expected to see fireworks timed to go off with the obligatory smooch. That, or Tinkerbelle to fly by.
Pardon me, I must now watch all five hours of the A&E version in penance.