Against my will, reason and better judgement, I capitulated and went off to see Pride and Prejudice too. And thoroughly enjoyed it, much to my surprise.
Pearl, Q_B and sh_wulfff have all summed it up well, and I can’t really add much more. Yes I did spent the first quarter hour or so thinking ‘oh no, oh dear, oh no’, but somewhere around ‘tolerable, but not handsome enough’ I began to change my mind.
I liked the location shots (Bronte-esque as they are). The light and space are different and this impacts on the delivery of the dialogue, resulting in some lines, some words within lines, being given a different stress which I found a little unsettling, and then kind of interesting.
Of course, because there are only 2 ½ hours which to tell the story a lot of the narrative is compressed and many minor characters have been dropped. While I missed them, I didn’t find that necessarily to be a bad thing because it allows the central story of D’Arcy and Elizabeth to be placed in sharper relief.
I was quite impressed by the scripting. There has been some condensing of Austen’s original words, and some dialogue has been added which puts a slightly more explanatory gloss on some characters, but this doesn’t jar over-much. Apparently Emma Thompson was involved in revising the script, and I think her fingerprints on it showed.
As the second review posted up there indicated, there are a lot of possible filters through which you can read this story. However, this version plays it pretty well straight down the line as a romance. It doesn’t explore any of the potential social issues or historical issues in any depth at all, although one of Mrs Bennet’s lines to Lizzy might be taken as am attempt to do that.
I could quibble about shifting the period, about the costumes, about the
hair!, about the odd (late 18th/early 19th century) mix up of manners and social protocols, about the decision to make Longbourn’s farming side so adjacent to its home side (I really do think that having livestock going almost into the kitchen was a bit much). But I won’t. It didn’t bug me enough to spoil the movie.
Apart from Donald Sutherland’s Mr Bennet, who seems rather more rustic and incompetent (and Canadian, accent-wise!), and less well-read than I’d imagined, and Bingley, who was not just easy-going he was an easy-going idiot, the casting is very good. We barely saw Wickham and Lady Catherine, and I’m not sure I would have understood the significance of Wickham to Lizzy if I hadn’t already read the book (and seen every other version of the story I could get my hands on
)
I was positively surprised by Keira Knightley’s performance. She does fit the bill in terms of the ‘fine eyes’, although lacking some other physical attributes (an absence of which became rather noticeable, given the style of dress). Even her mouth isn’t tooooooo distracting.
I found her to be a credible not quite one and twenty. Clever, but still quite innocent and just realising there may be more to love than playing word games. I suppose that was one reason whey Longbourn has been placed fair and square in the farmyard, to emphasize that this was not just a comedy of manners but one with it’s feet on the earth, holding the distinct promise of sex. Not that any more ‘happens’ than in the other vesion, in fact probably less, but sex is there as an undercurrent all the way through. There’s one curious scene at Pemberley which practically hits you over the head with it.
Matthew MacFadyen is suitably taciturn, although younger and more vulnerable than I had read D’Arcy to be. As Pearl says, that scene of him striding along through the early morning mist is particularly…memorable. There is a quite distinct sexual tension between this D’Arcy and Elizabeth.
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) and he was a bit too old ( Darcy beibng 28 rather than late 30's in age)...![[ img ]](http://www.goddess.com.au/goddesses/GoddessImages/Tara_Lunaea.jpg)
:gropehug: 
)
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And I love the Ang Lee movie, it's one of my very favourite films. 
