Keep the book...

Rating: 4/10 (30 October 2011)

I finished reading the book this week, and so decided to watch the movie. The differences between them are huge. Unfortunately the movie isn't that good for a lot of reasons.
What make Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice an amazing book isn't the love story between Lizzy and Darcy, but how she was able to concoct a full circle story full of subplots with so few in her hands. Even being written in the 19th Century, the book was some kind written to be adapted somehow. The chapters are divided like scenes. Those who are familiar to her books are well known that the lack of places and their descriptions are for the fact that she was a single home writer woman and never a person who traveled a lot or was interested or able to know different places, which also gives readers creative freedom to build in their minds their own places and locations. Jane's primer interests always were how people were able to relate to each other within their society and their different social classes in a era full of manners and customs. She was a gifted social observer, knowing perfectly how to outline and describe people's personality into her characters, giving to the readers the possibility to always differ characters by their ways and, the most important thing, their dialogs, by the way she structures them. She couldn't be able to describe perfectly a place, but she could describe perfectly and paint with words a character and its personality.
As the title says, all the gears of entire book resolves under both words and Jane plays with them all the time making them part of every single character, sometimes being a merit or sometimes being a flaw.
The movie not only cuts a lot of what is in the book but also misinterprets important meanings and characters. Also, it lacks of the subtlety, the irony and the sarcasm that are some of the most important characteristics of her style. Even the movie using most of the original dialogs, the actors seems to don't know whom they are exactly playing because they never give the impact or the subtle characteristics that Jane describes.
Mr. Bennet in the book is described as a man intensively sarcastic, dried by years of a marriage that slowly replaced the love by a day-by-day consideration and convenience, respecting and being comprehensible to everyone but never being a tender figure, completely the opposite of what Donald Sutherland portrayed in the movie and his remaining American accent. The same can be said about some other characters. Keira Knightley in my point of view wasn't the best choice and her 2006's Academy Award Nomination is a doubt in my head, but I prefer keep to myself my opinions about her as I know that there are a lot of people that intensively defends her performance. Mr. Darcy is a serious man tired of the hypocrite society that surrounds him and the usual formalities for being a public figure. He's almost a sociopath, because he loves the ones he likes and lives with, but he despite the ones he never met. He's a man of few words, but he's not impolite. He's subtle, he's clever and a great observer, and Matthew Macfadyen may have a strong figure and presence, but his performance is cold and empty, and not just contained and oppressed as Mr. Darcy really is. Mr. Collins, as Jane Austen describes, has a forced and inconvenient formality using difficult vocabulary when speaking to impress and seems noble, but he is not insecure and freak as the film shows. Most of the cast fades. Credits go for those ones who knew what they were doing like Brenda Blethyn as Mrs. Bennet and Judi Dench as Lady Catherine.
So... analyzing the movie as a whole, I think that Joe Wright could indeed have taken more advantage of the social criticism Jane Austen so implicit describes, also the relationships of people around their prides and prejudices, the subtlety and the sarcasm of the dialogs and the constant British formality.