How Lovely

Rating: 9/10 (20 April 2006)

This movie is, perhaps, perfect. I saw it four times in four weeks, always on the same day, and that way I knew that I had this treat waiting for me on Tuesday. I teach Jane Austen at a University in the UC system, so I am familiar with her work as well as with the film and television adaptations. This movie is better than what most people know as 'the Colin Firth mini-series'while it understandably cannot follow the facts of the book as accurately as the much longer mini-series, it has much more life in it than the mini-series, life that seems translated directly from the book, but also a life of it. The movie delights in a sort of beauty which is rich with colour and water and lightright now I am imagining the deep water-fed grass and the trees that seem a little prehistoric or fantastic; Keira's dresses, her eyes, the take through the ball which, after turning a corner, rests finally on Keira's sad face in a blue shadow. An abridged version of all that might be just to say that Pride and Prejudice is graceful. It is filled to the brim with grace. The even deeper, governing genius of the movie is in its presentiment of something sacred; we get closer, we get further away, and at acute focal points we are pulled almost right to the centre of that something sacred. See this movie.