Enjoyed it immensely

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2005)

I just saw it yesterday. I've read the book numerous times and watched the BBC series endlessly (in fact, it just happened to be on TV on Friday!). I still loved the movie. I think comparing a 5-hour mini-series and a 2-hour movie is an exercise in futility. The bottom line: the movie broadened but kept the humor of the book. It exaggerated the differences in class/income between Darcy and the Bennets (Longbourne is shown as a working farm/Lizzie and Jane share a bed -- which JA did with her sister...). It switched around some dialog and condensed and telescoped the story to basically Lizzie/Darcy, but I thought it was effective, albeit impressionistic. The movie also had a refreshing vigor. I was pleasantly surprised by Keira Knightly though she is a bit too glamorous at times (I could see her eye makeup). Matt MacFadyen makes a wonderful -- and different -- Darcy than our Colin. I love eye acting and he does that in spades. He makes him more vulnerable, a young man of high rank who's not that quite confident in himself. A friend who has not read the book but owns the mini-series quipped after we saw the movie, "Colin who?" There are Bronte-esquire touches. (But there were some Bronte-esquire touches to the mini-series -- like the bath scene, the lake scene and some of Colin's brooding alone moments.) And yeah, the US ending scene PP3 is Harlequin saccharine. Another member of our movie watching group, who is not a Jane Austen fan and actually disliked the book when she read for her book club, said the movie changed her mind. She had become impatient with the seeming frivolity of the characters' lives and the movie made her appreciate better how women of the time were desperately dependent on good marriages. If nothing else, it may have made a Jane Austen fan! Favorite minor character: Mr. Collins, who kept the audience howling. And Donald Sutherland's last scene is divine.