best screen vision of a classic novel

Rating: 10/10 (7 December 2006)

I'm not a fanatic Austen-film follower, but I'm always interested in screen versions of her novels, particularly because I read a lot and also work in film and video games (CG programmer). I think this is the best staging of _Pride and Prejudice_ I have seen. (And I believe I've seen most of them.) It wasn't a mini-series version of a three volume novel, it was a _movie_, and yet stayed true to the novel itself. As much as I admire Ang Lee's film version of _Sense and Sensibility_, this one is better. Since the actress/screenwriter Emma Thompson was involved in both, I suspect she got some ideas from the prior experience with S&S. However it happened, it's a well-done screenplay. It diverges in certain ways from the novel, but how could it not?
This version employed two interesting tactics -- picking out the most striking bits of dialog from the novel, and then filling them in with some more direct dialog; and replacing the many contemplative, letter-reading portions of the novel with cinematography. The fact is, Austen began this novel in the 18th century, when gentlefolk read a lot. And wrote letters. This is almost incomprehensible in the current day. The many scenes in Austen's novel where the heroine goes out for a walk to study a letter, or just to contemplate her family, are replaced with film work that conveys her mood and thinking.
The casting was also excellent. Austen wrote to her sister from London that she looked in some museum (the BM?) for a picture of her heroine. When I saw the movie, I felt that I was really seeing both Elizabeth ('feisty') and Jane Bennet (Jane's 'celestial' good looks). Austen would have approved.
There is a lot of musical anachronism, in this movie, yet the score works very well, and supports the cinematography.
I don't understand why anyone would want to make screen versions of Austen's novels, any more than I understand why they made TV versions of Trollope's Palliser novels. Something to sell to Masterpiece Theater USA, I suppose. But this version is both true to cinema and true to the novel. Something that could be compared to Visconti's _Garden of the Finzi-Continis_ and Karel Reiscz's _Who'll Stop The Rain._