Joe Wright brings his visual style to a very old piece of text but that cannot save the film form being slightly humdrum.

Rating: 6/10 (15 January 2009)

Here we go then, another Pride & Prejudice adaptation; a novel that's been around the block so many times even the popular Indian cinema film-makers amongst the British film industry have put their own spin on things, that little episode being 'Bride' & Prejudice. That particular film came out a mere year before Joe Wright's period romp debut and this take on things from Jane Austen's novel was obviously deemed by its director a pretty good place to start off, coming from a man who'd made some shorts and done some television work but here he gets to play amidst the big fish by taking a relatively large and well-known cast; a lot of money and is let loose amongst some top quality locales. It's a shame that the result is all very here and there.
I think Wright identified that the best approach, at least in his mind, for a debut is to take on someone else's subject matter or text and bring it to life in the way you deem worthy. It's a safe choice and to be fair, Wright brings the text to life with a string of attractive camera angles and shots, drifting into vast Georgian England rooms that see the mise-en-scene on most occasions just drip off the screen; wowing us with locations and sets that ooze of the authentic. But it was all an appetiser for Wright's following film Atonement, which is actually about something and actually contains a pinch of emotion complete with a connection to the characters. If whenever someone comes up to you and states Pride & Prejudice is better than Atonement, swiftly correct them.
So what is this film? It's an updating of a decades old tale for the 21st Century; whether that's a good thing or not is still up for debate. The Bennett sisters Jane (Pike); Elizabeth (Knightley); Mary (Riley); Catherine (Mulligan) and Lydia (Malone) are growing up much to the delight of their unnamed mother played by Brenda Blethyn and their father who's played by a slightly miscast Donald Sutherland  his job is to pop up every now and again and offer advice to his daughters in a sort of Jiminy Cricket role. Despite all these characters and this big overall family, it's only Elizabeth that is given much of the attention and it's only her we're really interested in.
What I don't like is the initial sense that these five girls are 'up for grabs'. Some girls rush into relationships and some get burnt in the process, disappearing and becoming confused whereas Elizabeth is more conservative and adopts a more mature stance in the sense she wishes to wait a while longer for that 'true' love sensation. The overall theme to do with coming of age and that mistake you might make with first impressions is clear: Elizabeth initially dislikes a certain Mr. Darcy (Macfadyen) but along the way, she will learn and mature and what have you before realising that certain things are not what they first appear.
I'd be lying if I said you don't let off the odd yawn during Pride & Prejudice. It's a tale about women; about love from the perspective of women with perspective being the key word in that sentence and I guess the easy thing to say would be that I'm not of the correct audience it's aimed at. Wright's second and most recent film, Atonement, was about a certain female perspective and it too had permutation's to do with love or lust. It was a distorted and immature perspective, one that was too young to figure out what was going on and I had no trouble with that film at all.
But when is all said and done, that cannot hide the film's ho-hum approach to its narrative. There are the early exchanges; the glances; the gazes and the touching of the said person as one helps the other to mount a horse upon leaving the manor house. What keeps the film afloat for most of its time is its direction, the highlight of which in a visual sense is an unbroken take as the camera waltzes through a gathering of people, switching from ground level to head height as the camera adsorbs the costume and the setting it is so lushly presenting to us, proud and prestigious indeed.
Another thing I noticed is that the film avoids, or at least did it sparsely enough for me not to notice, rendering one or any of its characters objects of the gaze. This is a theory built around the construction that certain characters or 'types' of characters are shot provocatively with the camera in order to subliminally force the audience into assuming them to be attractive. From what I saw, Pride & Predujice avoids doing this and for that I commend it, something very few films in the genre that would revolve around women, love, wanting to love and relationships would be successful in doing.
Towards the end and once Elizabeth has started to come to her senses, the film does run out of juice somewhat. Wright grows tired of the inventive camera angels and showing off the fancy mise-en-scene and the film needs Judi Dench's character to re-raise a little bit of interest as the climax nears, some welcome antagonism in the form of an old battle-axe role that Dench basks in. Whether the dramas of love and relationships are actually captured here and that it's just a fancy, period drama vehicle with flashy visuals and camera work remains debatable but you have to commend the film on what it does do well.