Jane Austen It Ain't.

Rating: 3/10 (3 August 2016)

There are so many holes I can pick in this 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's great novel "Pride & Prejudice" that I scarcely know where to start. Let's begin with Matthew Macfadyen & Keira Knightly who represent pride & prejudice respectively. Mr. Macfadyen's portrayal of Fitzwilliam Darcy is just awful, in my opinion. His acting is so flat that he manages to make the handsome, proud & haughty nobleman seem so dull & uninteresting that you wonder how any woman could possibly fall in love with him. Keira Knightley does better with her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett but she doesn't seem at all like a middle-class young lady of the Regency period. This isn't entirely Miss Knightley's fault, of course, but more the fault of the production team. If you are going to adapt a novel from the time when Jane Austen lived then you have to give it some accurate historical detail which this production noticeably lacks. Donald Sutherland as Elizabeth's father Mr. Bennett seems completely miscast & Brenda Blethyn as her mother doesn't feel right either. She comes across more like a Dickens character than Jane Austen. Tom Hollander plays the pompous, somewhat comical parson Mr. Collins who proposes to Elizabeth & is rejected. He just doesn't seem anywhere near pompous enough or at all comical as written by Jane Austen. In my opinion only Dame Judy Dench playing Darcy's aunt Lady Catherine De Burgh can take much credit in the acting department. As was quite correctly pointed out by another reviewer the dance where we are first introduced to Mr. Darcy & his friend Mr. Bingley seems much more like a peasant barn dance than a refined regency ball. It would be very interesting to hear Jane Austen's opinion of this production but I bet she would have hated it!. Both the 1980 BBC production with David Rintoul & Elizabeth Garvie and the 1995 effort with Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle were done very much better.