Prejudice .150, Pride .000

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2006)

Shortly before seeing this I'd reread the book and reseen the BBC serial, which took pains to convey the book's events and meanings faithfully. This movie doesn't do that so much, and in the publicity material on the DVD producer, director, and writer all agree on the text's being about the family's great love for each other; the writer even argues that Mrs. Bennet is a heroic character because of her great love for her daughters. This seems to me a flagrant misreading of the text; fortunately it isn't apparent in the movie, but the deficiency of humor it suggests is: the book is funny very often, the movie very seldom. The director imbues it with much vigor of an unsuitable type, which at times threatens to turn it into Wuthering Heights, at other times into Sharpe's Rifles. But even that would have been tolerable if the two leads had been more wisely cast. Matthew Macfayden as Darcy is none of the things the character is said to be, except dark; most of the time he just looks dopey and dour, like Jim Nabors trying to do Soames Forsyte. I assume he can appear more attractive than he's photographed here; the camera doesn't do very charitably by anyone, except the star, for whom the movie seems designed primarily as a modeling showcase. Keira Knightley does give intelligent readings of her lines--rather as if she'd just been listening to an audiobook of the novel--but they're always being nullified by her face, which rotates the same three or four expressions throughout, one of them an unnervingly vulpine baring of her upper teeth, none of them especially suitable to Elizabeth Bennet or to anything she might feel. Knightley comes to life once, in her big scene with Judi Dench, which suggests she might become an actress some day, if she would ever stop doing things so she could actually do something.