Sugar-coated Jane Austen

Rating: 2/10 (7 January 2006)

I'll be gratified if this 2005 P&P pulls in a younger crowd and gets a few of them reading the incomparable Jane Austen, but the BBC P&P remains unvanquished as THE screen adaptation of the book.
This P&P offers few improvements over the BBC production, but there are some: 1) Jane is supposed to be knock-dead beautiful, but is played by a bovine-looking actress in the BBC production. The 2005 P&P got the casting here straight.
2) Ditto the Wickham actor. The BBC's Wickham was odd-looking and not charming enough to warrant Lizzy and Lydia (plus the rest of the town) swooning over him at first meeting. The 2005 P&P, again, did a much-better casting job here.
3) I like this 2005 Darcy, which surprised me. After Colin Firth, I didn't think anyone could ever again come close to nailing this character. But this 2005 Darcy did something that Colin Firth did not: he made the difficult shift from being cold and snobbish at the start to the final lovable Darcy believably.
This is where this newer P&P falls short: 1) Way too much time spent on close-ups of Kira Knightley. There's so much to pack into this movie. Why waste all that time on these pointless scenes? After the 4th one, I was sighing with boredom.
Also, couldn't the costumers have chosen wardrobe that better disguised Knightley's painful thinness? Something's wrong when you stop paying attention to the movie and instead, muse on whether Knightley has anorexia or is host to a colony of tapeworms.
2) Why oh why did they portray the Bennett's house, Longbourne, as something akin to a pig farm? Every wall was cracked and needed paint, the stones crumbling. There's nothing in Jane Austen to support this interpretation, and it ignores fact: even if the Bennetts are a heartbeat (the father's) away from abject poverty, they are depicted as gentry in the book. Pigs in the house - pah!
3) Mrs. Bennett was not silly enough. Look, I feel for her in the novel. If I were Mrs. Bennett, I'd be out with a lasso looking for rich husbands for my daughters too, but dammit, this is NOT the way Jane Austen saw her. An extraordinarily important point was missed here: Mrs. Bennett has be stupid and embarrassing enough that you can understand why Darcy steers Bingley away from Jane. She must make you cringe with mortification. She has to be silly enough to exactly balance Lady Catherine, which is exactly what Austen did in the novel. It's a delicious parallel that this movie did not pull off.
4) Not enough Lydia! The movie never gave Lydia enough screen time to establish her character. Ditch those overlong close-ups of Knightley moon-cowing around and add more Lydia!
5) Mr. Collins 2005: nice try,but not quite as good as Mr. Collins BBC.
6) Donald Sutherland a decent Mr Bennett, but this movie makes his relationship with Mrs. Bennett too warm, too intimate. The real Mr Bennett avoids the missus at all costs, irritably holing up in the library. When he has to be around her, his comments (all of which go over her head) hold her up to ridicule. Austen gets downright mean in her characterizations on this point. The 2005 movie had an improbable scene that showed Mr and Mrs Bennett in bed, talking and laughing together, a cuddly little scene that, considering everything Austen wrote, was ridiculous.
Overall, this movie missed out on some of the best fun in Jane Austen's novel: the biting humor, the occasionally mean (but horribly funny) wit. Yes, it was funny in parts but because it ignored the Austen edginess, it never achieved the depth of the BBC version.
Nice try, but nothing close to the BBC's rendition.