Soapy modernism

Rating: 2/10 (23 April 2009)

While this film is in many ways technically well crafted, it is completely spoiled by the anachronistic attitudes of the characters. Throughout, the important characters behave as if they were modern Americans (and in Donald Sutherland's case, speaks like one), rather than citizens of the early 19th century, where the movie is set.
While I'm actually a big fan of some of the movies that re-imagine novels like Pride & Prejudice in a modern setting (Clueless, Bridget Jones' Diary, etc.), when the director decides to make a period picture that presumes to represent Jane Austen's novel as written, there has to be some minimal standard for adhering to the historical nature of the book. This movie fails (badly) to meet that minimal standard. In fact, the way the folks in this movie behave more like characters who wandered out of Beverly Hills 90210 strikes an offensive note. It suggests self-absorption: the modern audience isn't really interested in what it might have been like to live in Austen's day, but rather wants to be reassured that it was a simple mirror image of their own melodramatic, "emo" existence.
It rubs one the wrong way to think that people who will never read the Austen book will sit through the movie, and come away thinking they've in any way digested what Austen had to offer. It isn't merely a matter of style differences (though the style of speech and interaction often feels far more modern than historic). It's that the very relationships between the characters as written by Austen are strongly affected by their class standings and differences. It's impossible to read the book and not understand that Austen's primary task in the writing of it was to criticize and satirize the class underpinnings of her society. To turn such a book into a simple soap opera is sham.
The ironic thing is that Austen's book is much funnier and livelier than this movie. Pride and Prejudice as written has more in common with Monty Python dressing up as middle-class British ladies in order to make fun of (20th century) British society than it does with this maudlin romance.