A Bitchslap Worthy of the Lady Catherine de Bourgh

Courtesy of Dearest Jonathan we have Anthony Lane's review of Pride and Prejudice from The New Yorker.

Two words describe it quite well: deliciously bitchy.

{...}What would Mr. Bennet make of the film? He would be left wondering, I suspect, why God gave him only two eyebrows to raise. Let us not even ponder the likely reactions of Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Judi Dench), Darcy’s glacier of an aunt, or those of Mr. Collins (Tom Hollander), the reverend munchkin who resides on Lady Catherine’s estate and slithers beneath her gaze. What they would find incomprehensible in the movie is not the storytelling, which charts with commendable briskness the motions of various hearts, but the prevailing mood. Who is this figure, complete with steed and flying cape, who canters through the dusky woods as if eager to get home before the moon turns him into a wolf? Why, it is our friend Mr. Darcy, who has just popped round to deliver a letter. What is the purpose of this tangerine glow that fills the screen? Has the movie taken an unheralded commercial break, in which tanning lotion is being hawked to the audience? No, this is the view from inside Lizzie’s closed eyelids on a sunny day. And whence this knocking at the door after dark, which brings the nightshirted Bennets downstairs with quivering candles? It is Lady Catherine, come to bawl and bark at Lizzie in a surprising reënactment of the drill-sergeant routine from “Full Metal Jacket.”

What has happened is perfectly clear: Jane Austen has been Brontëfied. In the book, Lady Catherine appears in daylight, “too early in the morning for visitors.” The film has rightly kept the hint of social insolence but switched the hour, so that the dramatic may be shaded and inked into melodrama. The question is not whether the director was justified in that transmutation but whether he had the choice; whether any of us, as moviemakers, viewers, or readers, retain the ability—not so much the scholarly equipment as the imaginative clairvoyance—to see Austen clearly. Maybe we are doomed to view her through the smoked glass of the intervening centuries, during which the spirit of romance, and the role of the body within it, have evolved out of all recognition. Why, when Lizzie accompanies her aunt and uncle to the Peak District of England, should the film take care to set her silent upon a peak, her dress and tresses stirring in the wind, if not to drop the clanging hint that Mr. Darcy is less an icy gentleman of means than a britches-busting Heathcliff in the making?{...}

Make sure you read the whole thing.

I have said it before, I will say it again: if you are watching any version of Pride and Prejudice other than this one, you are missing out. This is easily one of the best---if not the best---projects that television, let alone the Beeb, has ever produced. If you are one of those people who moans and groans about the liberties taken with books that are adapted for either the small or large screen, know that for once (!!!!) they finally stayed true to a book and did it up right. It's an adaptation truly worthy of the novel. The novel is, in my humble opinion, Austen's best, so it is quite perfect, in the scheme of that thing called universal justice, that such a great novel would have a worthy adaptation. This miniseries hit every note perfectly.

And besides, why would you want to see this stupid new version when it's pretty darn obvious that Matthew MacFayden can't carry the ruffles off like this guy can?

QED

Posted by Kathy at November 11, 2005 10:48 PM | TrackBack