Posting an old film review in an effort to take my mind off other things.
I freely admit that when it came to the movie of "Pride and Prejudice", my first question was - why bother making one? There is already a true-to-the-book interpretation in the BBC version with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and frankly, the idea of filming it again made me think of the ads for milk: "You Can't Improve On Perfect".
However. In the interests of fairness, and because I'd hate to think that I simply can't accept a new version of an old favourite (*cough*Phantom*cough*), I went and saw it. I was determined to find something to like about it, and I did: Mr Bingley was lovable (actually the Jane/Bingley romance was much better than that Lizzy/Darcy one, and that's plain weird); Mrs Bennet was less a caricature and more a real person; Mary (the dorky middle sister) was lovely as the sulky quiet kid; Charlotte Lucas was OOC but in a way I rather liked.
The list of things I didn't like is summed up very nicely in the following review I found.
A Failed RomanceA Failed Romance
from The Spark.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that movie producers hoping for a romantic hit must be in want of a Jane Austen adaptation. But what to do when there aren't any unadapted novels left? Why, remake the most popular one! As Mr. Darcy might say, any savage can make a movie, and while those responsible for this film aren't quite savages, they certainly prove themselves too coarse for Austen's genteel novel.
The fundamental problem with this film is that the spirit of a Romantic melodrama is misapplied to a Classically-proportioned novel. I never appreciated just how perfectly balanced are the plot and characters of P&P until the movie's succession of manufactured emotional outbursts and artificially heightened moments of suspense completely unravel the film's coherence by the third act. The basic plot of Pride and Prejudice, let's face it, is an overly coincidence-driven fairy tale—but it works because of Austen's characteristic narrative restraint. The writers of this movie, on the other hand, remove all subtlety. We have unaccountably absurd shots like the close-up of a hog's gonads or Elizabeth and Darcy dancing in a suddenly empty ballroom. We have two marriage proposals accompanied by the sort of rainy, foggy weather only the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw could find romantic. We have characters who are overwrought distortions; the even-keeled pragmatist, Charlotte Lucas, for example, is made to confess how frightened she is of spinsterhood. Add in "period" music whose style actually post-dates the action by ten to thirty years and suddenly everything for which we adore Jane Austen's novels—her social commentary, morality, and wit—is drowned a sea of everyone's favorite Romantic clichйs.
And the dialogue. Oh, the horror! No less a literary critic than Virginia Woolf praised Jane Austen for "[devising] a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never [departing] from it." Indeed, adapting Jane Austen always poses a challenge because the narrative distance she maintains means that screenwriters must intermingle their own dialogue with Austen's; she's especially demure in the most emotional scenes. As a result, in this movie we get shabby imitations like, "You have bewitched me body and soul" alongside, "It taught me to hope as I scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before." Most screenwriters at least respect the dialogue Austen does provide; many of this novel's exchanges between Elizabeth and Darcy stand out as her most piquant. The writers of this movie, however, have the uncommonly bad taste to rewrite some of the best scenes, like Mr. Darcy's first insult to Lizzy and their argument after his first proposal. The seams of this movie are shockingly apparent; you can tell at every moment what is from Austen and what is from the screenwriters.
There is just so much the writers do not comprehend about this novel. Again and again they pretend to know better than Austen, and we end up with a strangely disjointed film as a result. For example, let's analyze their changes to the most pivotal scene in the novel: Elizabeth's tour of Pemberley. In the novel, this scene serves to allow Elizabeth, through the housekeeper who has known him since he was a child, to learn that Darcy is not the arrogant man she took him for, but instead uncommonly kind-hearted. When she unexpectedly sees him immediately thereafter, she is thus primed to receive his attentions for the first time without prejudice. In the movie, however, she mostly ignores the housekeeper's babbling as she caresses naked marble statues. So in the next scene (ridiculously rewritten to accentuate Elizabeth's embarrassment), she may be primed to rip off his clothes, but to see him with new eyes? No, not unless the opulence of Pemberley overwhelmed her into adopting her mother's distasteful, pecuniary approach to matrimony.
Overall, while it is clear that this movie fails as a Jane Austen adaptation, it may possibly succeed if you divorce it from its source. It's impossible for me to tell as a devotйe of the novel. The details that to me jar the smooth flow of the novel's action may to others make the movie more satisfying cinematically. But I came to see a remake of a Jane Austen novel and could scarcely detect her genius beneath them all.