The Heart Has Its Reasons.

Rating: 7/10 (6 June 2015)

A proper English romance among the hills and the dales and the fens and the stately homes. The men bow, the women curtsy. The proprieties are always observed. The roles of class and gender were tautly drawn, and Jane Austen really gets down on the predicament of women. They couldn't DO anything on their own. Austen herself would let no stranger catch her in the act of writing. The only means of advancement was through marriage.
That's the topic she deals with here. How are Mr. Bennet's five daughters going to marry well when Bennet's own estate is in debt? Powerful men aren't supposed to be interested in women of lower background. A convoluted conundrum.
Yet the distinctions of class between the Bennet girls and the men who are attracted to them, or the other way round, are strictly middle class in nature. We learn nothing about the poor. Dickens would come eighteen years after "Pride and Prejudice." It's not difficult to figure out who is going to wind up with whom, at least not where one of the daughters, Keira Knightley, and one of the men of greater social esteem, Matthew MacFadyen, are concerned. We know more or less right off the bat because the two of them don't get along at first, due to a misunderstanding, and they are two handsome people. At least I suppose MacFadyen is handsome. I'm SURE that Keira Knightley is handsome -- or somewhere beyond handsome, in some celestial orbit of beauty where she dwells with the ghosts of actresses like Audrey Hepburn. Yum.
I have the same problem with Jane Austen that I have with much of Shakespeare -- not that I'm that familiar with either. But both writers produced all kinds of succulent prose and poetry. The difficulty is that the stories aren't all that good. And she's often confusing. Even her habitations are confusing. One guy in a chat room produced a photo of an ordinary Georgian brick home and claimed it was Jane Austen's house. I argued with him because I'd visited the house of Jane Austen and it was a thatch-roofed English cottage. We finally had to agree that she might have actually lived in two different houses.
"Pride and Prejudice" on film is an epic soap opera, and the only thing that can lift it out of the doldrums is Austen's marvelous prose, which we can't read, and her dialog, which at least we can hear. And the performers have to be very good to come up with a successful production -- and that they do.
It's really well done. I find it hard to believe that real people spoke the way Austen has them speak, but the actors and actresses do a convincing job of it. Such elegance! All of them are minimally of professional caliber. Judi Dench is a standout. Make up has given her a whirling hair style that looks like some kind of cartoon but is perfect for her arrogant and snobbish character. Kiera Knightley does very well by the role of the confused eligible daughter. She should leave her face to the British Museum. Her left eye slants upward and outward at an alarming angle and her chin is determined. Her features, in combination with her model's neck, lend themselves to a display of either fright and vulnerability or sassiness and even something worse. She'd make a great Catwoman or Supergirl.