A beautiful film, but not Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2006)

****** this comment may contain spoilers *******
Trailing in the wake  albeit 10 years later  of the superb BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, the 2005 film directed by Joe Wright is a lively two hours. Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen are brilliant up and coming actors who deliver fine performances in the roles of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy  considering the script they have to work with.
Quite naturally, a film has time constraint and isn't going to convey the story as powerfully as did the book or the much longer mini-series that so faithfully encapsulated Jane Austen's classic tale of true love threatened to be thwarted by those two evils, pride and prejudice. However, the recent film's screenplay focuses on the two main characters - and not all that successfully  and its lack of veracity to Austen's novel leads to further disappointments concerning vital secondary characters and settings.
The parts of the cynical and careless, though likable, Mr Bennet and his awful, neurotic wife; the obsequious Mr Collins; the haughty Lady Catherine de Bourg; the flighty and hopelessly shallow Lydia; whilst well-acted, (apart from Donald Sutherland's atrocious "English" accent) fail to be the characters of Austen's book. And what happened to the amiable and all too malleable Mr Bingly, who behaved like a grinning simpleton having a "bad hair" day for the duration of the film? As for the scurrilous Wickham, his brief appearance on screen seems hardly enough to develop sufficient interest in the character to vaguely care if Darcy has swindled him out of his rightful inheritance, or to ultimately sense disgust that he is a contemptible scoundrel.
All in all, if one overlooks the lack of faithfulness to the book in the film - where Jane Austen's country gentry are portrayed as bucolic yokels, where an enormously endowed pig wanders through the dilapidated kitchen of what is supposed to be Austen's gracious Longbourn, where her genteel Mr Bennet plays "Farmer" - Joe Wright's take on the literary classic is beautifully filmed with settings and costumes that are a delight to the eye.
That's all very well and, if the film was not the retelling of a famous piece of literature, artistic expression could reign free. However, it is impossible to view a film titled "Pride and Prejudice" and not expect Jane Austen's characters to come alive on the screen; to see her settings believably depicted.
Ultimately, two hours of watching this latest rendition of Pride and Prejudice buys one little more than the bare bones of the classic story; disordered skeletal remains, at that. Therefore, the film fails to engage the sympathies; fails to enmesh one in the lives of characters of such literary magnitude that they deserve our notice and concern, for in Joe Wright's film they do not exist as Austen portrayed them. Without the natural response of regret for each of her characters' foibles and disappointments, there is no ultimate sharing in Austen's majestic victory of love for another over love of ego.