Pride and Prejudice (2005)Starring: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Rosamund Pike, Jenna Malone, Carey Mulligan, Talulah Riley, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland, Simon Woods, Tom Hollander, Rupert Friend, Judi Dench
Pride and Prejudice is one of Kate's favourite books. She reads it at least once a year. A few years ago, being a devoted boyfriend with the best of intentions, I decided I would read it in order to gain an appreciation for something so important to her. Not being a dynamite reader though, meant that it was not long before I drowned under the weight of an excessive number of different Miss. Bennet's and threw in the towel. When Kate recently started reading the book again I decided that perhaps watching the film was a more achievable goal for me. With both of us having just got back from leading a youth camp over the weekend, feeling a bit exhausted and keen for a morning off, I thought now would be a good time to give it a shot, with Kate happy to watch it with me and explain/interpret.
Elizabeth Bennet (Knightley) lives with her parents and four sisters in their middle class estate in Hartfordshire in Georgian England. Due to Mr. Bennet (Sutherland) not having a male heir, when he dies his estate will pass to a distant cousin, Mr. Collins (Hollander), rather than his daughters. Therefore the future security of his family is dependent on his daughters finding suitable husbands. Life for the Bennet sisters is largely uneventful until the wealthy and eligible bachelor Mr. Bingley (Woods) arrives in town, bringing with him the even wealthier but much more abrasive Mr. Darcy (Macfadyen). The eldest Miss Bennet, Jane (Pike), quickly catches the eye of Bingley, while Elizabeth jumps to a hasty conclusion about the character of Darcy, swearing to loathe him forever. However, not everything is so straight forward as the sisters have to work through the the prejudices of the inter-class relations, and the gossip and scandal that ensues.
Pride and Prejudice is kind of a difficult film for me to talk about. Usually when you approach a film like this, one based on a much loved novel, the initial point of analysis is how true to the spirit of the novel the adaptation is. Having not read the novel (beyond the first couple of chapters) this option of analysis is not really open to me. That being said, I can still appreciate it as a film, even if I am not getting the full Pride and Prejudice experience.
As a film, it was good without being anything groundbreaking. It received Oscar nominations for costume and art direction, two fields you would expect a well made period piece to excell in. It contained some quite good performances. Keira Knightley put in one of the best performances I've seen from her, earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She was really engaging as Elizabeth Bennet, standing out from the other female characters as an intelligent woman, making her sparring with Darcy quite interesting, and I'm assured by Kate that she did do justice to the character. Personally, I quite enjoyed the performance of Donald Sutherland, who I thought played the part of the slightly bemused patriarch living in a home overrun by six women very well (perhaps he was the character I could most easily relate to). He even made a valiant effort at an English accent. Though the three youngest Bennet sisters, Mary, Kitty and Lydia, all seemed a bit two dimensional compared to Elizabeth and even Jane who was fleshed out a bit more. I'm not sure whether this was the case in the novel or whether it was the fact that the focus on them had to be pulled back in order to keep the film to an acceptable running time.
There were a couple of moments in the film where I thought Wright tried to be a bit too arty and it didn't quite fit the tone of the film, which largely went for a straight forward realism. The first one was in the ball when Elizabeth and Darcy were dancing and all of a sudden all the other dancers just disappear, only to reappear at the end of the dance. I understand perfectly what Wright intended for this to suggest, but I found it quite a jarring moment. The same could be said of a later scene in which Elizabeth looks at herself in the mirror and we see the shadows in the background crawl across the screen as if to suggest that she has been standing there all day. Again, this action was intended to make a point, and it did, but I don't know whether the point it made was worth the breaking of the tone of the film.
I did disgust myself at one point during the watching of this film where I found myself following the story of Pride and Prejudice based on what I knew of Bridget Jones's Diary. It is one of my pet hates when people are more familiar with a copy/cover/reference than with the original source. More precisely my pet hate is when people accuse the original of 'ripping off' the copy (eg. "Blofeld is such a rip off of Dr. Evil", "Queen totally ripped off that Vanilla Ice song"). Either way, when I got to the scene in which Mr. Wickham is telling Elizabeth why his relationship with Mr. Darcy had gone sour and found myself going "Ah, I remember this scene with Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary", I was ashamed that I was more familiar with the pop culture reference than the classical original.
I'm glad to have seen this film, if for no other reason that I now know what Pride and Prejudice is all about. It is a good film, with some good performances, and I quite enjoyed it, but as you would expect it no doubt has a lot more for the devoted Austen fan than for the casual movie-goer.
Pride and Prejudice is one of Kate's favourite books. She reads it at least once a year. A few years ago, being a devoted boyfriend with the best of intentions, I decided I would read it in order to gain an appreciation for something so important to her. Not being a dynamite reader though, meant that it was not long before I drowned under the weight of an excessive number of different Miss. Bennet's and threw in the towel. When Kate recently started reading the book again I decided that perhaps watching the film was a more achievable goal for me. With both of us having just got back from leading a youth camp over the weekend, feeling a bit exhausted and keen for a morning off, I thought now would be a good time to give it a shot, with Kate happy to watch it with me and explain/interpret.
Elizabeth Bennet (Knightley) lives with her parents and four sisters in their middle class estate in Hartfordshire in Georgian England. Due to Mr. Bennet (Sutherland) not having a male heir, when he dies his estate will pass to a distant cousin, Mr. Collins (Hollander), rather than his daughters. Therefore the future security of his family is dependent on his daughters finding suitable husbands. Life for the Bennet sisters is largely uneventful until the wealthy and eligible bachelor Mr. Bingley (Woods) arrives in town, bringing with him the even wealthier but much more abrasive Mr. Darcy (Macfadyen). The eldest Miss Bennet, Jane (Pike), quickly catches the eye of Bingley, while Elizabeth jumps to a hasty conclusion about the character of Darcy, swearing to loathe him forever. However, not everything is so straight forward as the sisters have to work through the the prejudices of the inter-class relations, and the gossip and scandal that ensues.
Pride and Prejudice is kind of a difficult film for me to talk about. Usually when you approach a film like this, one based on a much loved novel, the initial point of analysis is how true to the spirit of the novel the adaptation is. Having not read the novel (beyond the first couple of chapters) this option of analysis is not really open to me. That being said, I can still appreciate it as a film, even if I am not getting the full Pride and Prejudice experience.
As a film, it was good without being anything groundbreaking. It received Oscar nominations for costume and art direction, two fields you would expect a well made period piece to excell in. It contained some quite good performances. Keira Knightley put in one of the best performances I've seen from her, earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She was really engaging as Elizabeth Bennet, standing out from the other female characters as an intelligent woman, making her sparring with Darcy quite interesting, and I'm assured by Kate that she did do justice to the character. Personally, I quite enjoyed the performance of Donald Sutherland, who I thought played the part of the slightly bemused patriarch living in a home overrun by six women very well (perhaps he was the character I could most easily relate to). He even made a valiant effort at an English accent. Though the three youngest Bennet sisters, Mary, Kitty and Lydia, all seemed a bit two dimensional compared to Elizabeth and even Jane who was fleshed out a bit more. I'm not sure whether this was the case in the novel or whether it was the fact that the focus on them had to be pulled back in order to keep the film to an acceptable running time.
There were a couple of moments in the film where I thought Wright tried to be a bit too arty and it didn't quite fit the tone of the film, which largely went for a straight forward realism. The first one was in the ball when Elizabeth and Darcy were dancing and all of a sudden all the other dancers just disappear, only to reappear at the end of the dance. I understand perfectly what Wright intended for this to suggest, but I found it quite a jarring moment. The same could be said of a later scene in which Elizabeth looks at herself in the mirror and we see the shadows in the background crawl across the screen as if to suggest that she has been standing there all day. Again, this action was intended to make a point, and it did, but I don't know whether the point it made was worth the breaking of the tone of the film.
I did disgust myself at one point during the watching of this film where I found myself following the story of Pride and Prejudice based on what I knew of Bridget Jones's Diary. It is one of my pet hates when people are more familiar with a copy/cover/reference than with the original source. More precisely my pet hate is when people accuse the original of 'ripping off' the copy (eg. "Blofeld is such a rip off of Dr. Evil", "Queen totally ripped off that Vanilla Ice song"). Either way, when I got to the scene in which Mr. Wickham is telling Elizabeth why his relationship with Mr. Darcy had gone sour and found myself going "Ah, I remember this scene with Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary", I was ashamed that I was more familiar with the pop culture reference than the classical original.
I'm glad to have seen this film, if for no other reason that I now know what Pride and Prejudice is all about. It is a good film, with some good performances, and I quite enjoyed it, but as you would expect it no doubt has a lot more for the devoted Austen fan than for the casual movie-goer.
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