Enjoyable but flawed

Rating: 7/10 (27 March 2006)

First of all, I enjoyed this version; I really did. What it got right is a more distinct sense of the darker and chaotic side of Jane Austen's worlds. There's a lot of melancholy here, which wasn't rendered in the preceding TV series. The Brits--though this time contaminated by French input, which didn't help at all; it seldom does--can do Austen very well indeed when they put their minds to it. The BBC version of Emma with Kate Beckinsale was so much superior to the boring Paltrow cinema version.
Where does this latest production of P&P fail? The first problem coming to mind is the script. Adaptation is an art all of its own, and while the TV series had time to plot out most of the significant narrative strands of the novel, two hours of film doesn't. Purely from a scripting point of view, significant characterizations--'significant' in the sense that they contributed to the explication and bringing-to-live of the central characters--were far too 'pro forma', almost as if they were thrown in because the writer felt that they needed to. The result was that many of them had no function at all, and cluttered up the action and diffused the narrative focus.
The second problem had to do with direction. The first half, with the aid of the muddled script, was confusing, unconvincing and occasionally annoying. I loved the deconstruction of the decorous superficiality that adhered to the TV series, and the occasionally chaotic social occasions; but in the end it got too much, and the interactions of the main characters were lost, instead of, as the director presumably intended, contextualized. Also, the sound was awful. The deliberate toning-down and made-hard-to-hear-above-the-din of individual conversations may have had an element of realism, but the strain of the listener, having to work out just exactly what was being said, didn't help one's becoming engrossed in the tale. The vacuous sisters and mother and their hysterical carry-ons also became annoying and were overdone and for too long.
Third problem: Keira Knightley. She's a cool actress, who fits perfectly into King Arthur, Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually--but here she was very much miscast. If the producers had had any guts they would have cast the incomparable Rosamund Pike in that role, instead of wasting her in the nearly-invisible part of Jane Bennett. Rosamund was the one saving grace among the women of Die Another Day, and here, too, she basically stole the show without even trying hard whenever she appeared, whether she said or did much or, as was the case for the most time, not. Keira, by contrast, needs to act-by-effort since she doesn't as yet have enough depth of personality. Too much 'star' and not enough 'character'; quite unsuitable for this part. She battled her way through it valiantly, and I admire her for that, but it just wasn't 'right' for her. The mis-casting was rivaled only by the casting of Katie Holmes in Batman Begins.
Fourth problem: just about all the male characters, except for Donald Sutherland, who can do no wrong. That the film should fade out with a shot of him was an unexpected stroke of genius. I wonder if it was scripted that way or a directorial decision.
Having said all these basically negative things, I'd like to finish on a positive note, which is that in the second half, when the 'busy-ness' started to abate, the film actually acquired depth and became quite touching. The final scene between Elizabeth and her father was the crown, and if an ending is what makes a movie, it makes me forgive many other mistakes.
But just imagine if, instead of Keira Knightley it had Rosamunde Pike who had been doing that scene with Sutherland. It would have been near-perfection.
4 stars solely because of the second half and a great attempt to take the saccharine edge off the movie-incarnations of Austen's novels.
Till Noever, owlglass.com, Author: KEAEN, CONTINUITY SLIP