Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen
This deliciously intelligent adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved classic shakes off the dust and sparkles with life.
Nov 11, 2005 | In Joe Wright's blissful, blazingly intelligent adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," characters walk about with mud on their shoes. The women's hair is pulled back into simple chignons, but there are always a few brushy strands that won't stay put. Public dances held in country halls are messy and raucous, and the partygoers dance in imperfect though decorous formations, as if they'd learned the steps from a favorite aunt or uncle and not from a choreographer. We even get a glimpse of an extremely realistic farm hog, unneutered, unprettified, and wholly unconcerned with being a movie star.
In this "Pride & Prejudice," we can understand at a glance how much, or how little, money means to any given character: We can read anxiety or confidence in the cut of an overcoat, in the type of knickknacks that decorate a room, even in the set of a character's shoulders. In this "Pride & Prejudice," realism isn't a punishment, but a kind of music, a sound that cuts from Austen's day to ours with the clarity of a strong radio signal. There isn't a frame in the picture that doesn't feel alive and immediate, instead of merely faithful.
Austen's novel, written in 1797 but not published until 1813, is one of the most fiercely beloved books in the English language, and those of us who love it are ferociously protective of the characters at the center of it: Twenty-year-old Elizabeth Bennet (here played by Keira Knightley), whose intelligence is her greatest gift and whose cleverness is her greatest burden, and Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), a young man of privilege and breeding who unconsciously hides his sensitive, fine-grained character behind a scrim of snobbery. The casting here is more perfect than in any "Pride & Prejudice" adaptation I've seen (I confess I'm not a fan of the popular 1995 British miniseries, which I found so slow, proper and reverent that it seemed a direct inversion of the spirit of the book), and Wright is fearless in his handling of the characters, refusing to bow to their iconic stature. It's as if he's unraveled every golden thread we've spun around Elizabeth and Darcy over the years to reveal living, breathing people underneath. He's saved them from the mummification of our love.
"Pride & Prejudice" opens with a shot of the English countryside, but even then, it's not the generic assemblage of kelly-green rolling hills we usually get, scenery for scenery's sake. This landscape is a misty blue-green, and it hasn't quite woken up yet, although the birds twittering on the soundtrack are beginning to nudge it toward consciousness -- an early promise that Wright is more interested in action than in tasteful, period lethargy. Knightley's Elizabeth Bennet (Lizzy to her family) is of a piece with this landscape. While Knightley has the kind of face that's universally considered beautiful, her beauty feels muted here -- it's deferential to her expressiveness. The alertness in her eyes, the way her smile seems to crack out of nowhere like a sliver of sunlight on a cloudy day: Everything about her speaks of serene, as opposed to brash, self-confidence and intellectual mischievousness.
She needs to bring all of that intelligence and fortitude to bear when dealing with her family: Lizzy is the second eldest of five girls, who, because they weren't born male, can't inherit the modest estate of their father (Donald Sutherland). Because of that, their flighty, featherbrained mother (Brenda Blethyn) is desperate to marry them off to make sure they're well provided for, and when she learns that a rich young bachelor, Mr. Bingley (the affably redheaded Simon Woods), is renting a nearby estate, her fluttery desperation blossoms into behavior that's garish and embarrassing.
