board77

RELStuart wrote:

Besides... I think Keira is hot!

Prim wrote:

The '95 production is a six-hour (nominally) miniseries. It's available on DVD. And it's splendid. I consider it the high-water mark for literary adaptation (and this is a book I have loved dearly for many years).

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Screened the new Pride and Prejudice yesterday. The test audience was sizable, skewing toward the younger demographic… shouldn’t be a problem for this film, though. This version is specifically tailored to the tastes of the faux-intellectual, pseudo-erudite college crowd… you know, the sort of folks who’ve read the book—and forgotten about it.

That’s the problem. The most socially accomplished individuals don’t straddle the schisms between cliques—they walk all over them, back and forth. See, the “can’t beat ‘em… join ‘em” philosophy is time tested. There’s no point in attempting to attain a catholic mastery of the social order; do one thing or the other, then excel. This Pride and Prejudice can’t make up its mind.

There’s something about the movie that feels so… sophomoric. It isn’t, however, your run-of-the-mill Hollywood tripe; on the contrary, it is self-consciously urbane, projecting the mannerisms of Jane Austen’s novel with the frenzied eagerness of a terrier on speed. The script is remarkably faithful to the original story, but it feels discombobulated. The pacing borders on attention-deficit, substituting aren’t-I-clever humor and bathos-drenched grandiosity for dramatic space and—here’s the kicker—narrative dynamics. In other words, it tries a bit too hard.

To be fair, it hits a lot of the marks. Props go to the art department and cinematographer Roman Osin… it’s pretty. Director Joe Wright is either a fascinating mainstream director or a confused art house hack… I choose the former. Wright’s directorial style may be somewhat derivative, but it’s interesting to see a Leone influence juxtaposed with something a little more… genteel.

The cast, too, acquits itself well. Judi Dench chews the scenery. Donald Sutherland is as close to badass as anything in the film. Keira Knightley contributes a surprisingly effective performance as the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet; I sort of can’t believe I’m saying this, but nubile, svelte, whatever… the girl’s not half bad. The acting, in fact, is the film’s principal virtue; all of the performers manage to capture the nuance of Austen’s writing, even if the film itself is convoluted.

But the pacing. Goddamn it, the pacing. Although the script retains the finest moments from the book—even managing to de-emphasize the hypothetical gelding of the proto-feminist heroine—it just moves so damn fast. This will leave the viewer with one of two impressions: (a) an unhappy sort of inebriation OR (b) the notion that something really long, really boring just went by. You should have heard the kids complaining at the urinals.

It’s no secret that cinematic adaptations seldom work. The screen is seductive, imperious—a deceptively intimate experience that, given the smelly, sweaty milieu of the modern movie theater, sometimes amounts to legalized voyeurism. The written word, however, requires a more proactive involvement, a level of intellectual commitment that rewards patience and devotion. They’re fundamentally dissimilar entities; what works in one medium seldom works in the other. That’s why those Star Wars adaptations are so mind-numbingly anemic. That’s also why no one—no one—will ever get Pride and Prejudice completely right.

I reserve the right to hope that the film will benefit from some re-editing… but it seems impossible to wholly rework—not without extensively deconstructing the present cut. It’s all so sad… especially because there’s so much stuff to like. Maybe the actors will get some recognition—and rightfully so—but no one will aver that this “new” Pride and Prejudice is the second coming. Faux-intellectual? Bullshit. This film—this cut—proves it: it’s hard to be proud of your college years.

Rhythm-a-ning

TheLidlessEyes wrote:

RELStuart wrote:

Besides... I think Keira is hot!

Seek an optician.

In terms of her acting skills, she is perfectly cast opposite Orlando Bloom in POTC.

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Austin Antics

What? No sewing, no simpering, no empire-line frocks? A new film of Pride & Prejudice is Austen with grit, says Joanna Briscoe

In the popular imagination, there have been countless film adaptations of that all-time classic Pride and Prejudice. Yet this is far from the truth. The 1995 BBC series, featuring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, was so dominant, so universally adored, it has lingered in the public consciousness as a cinematic standard. But this year’s Pride & Prejudice, released in September, is actually the first serious film version for 65 years — only the famed, but oddly flawed, black-and-white 1940 adaptation, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, preceded it.

Jane Austen, like Dickens, is slotted automatically into a clichéd visual groove. The traditional Austen adaptation is Regency-lite: a painterly tableau of empire-line dresses, sotto voce ballroom chatter, squeals and high-ceilinged elegance. The great directorial challenge is to surpass the conventions of the chamber piece — often literally — by taking the action outside. But Austen was a novelist for whom the Napoleonic wars were merely glimpsed through the drawing- room window, whose female protagonists were bound by convention to follow highly formalised codes of behaviour, so the text itself dictates many of its own constraints.

As with contemporary biographers who feel obliged to conjure up a surprise approach to a tried-and-tested subject, there is pressure on film-makers to fashion difference for its own sake. Working Title’s Pride & Prejudice combines that mandatory quest for originality with a genuine desire to take a fresh look at a period that has been subject to chocolate-box inanities like no other. The tale of five sisters who face penury unless their mother can marry them off is so iconic that bringing it to the screen at all is daring.

The first advantage lies in the leftfield choice of director. Joe Wright is a 33-year-old with a background in social-realist television drama such as the gritty-but-moving Bob & Rose, and the Bafta-winning mini-series Charles II, which was shot partly in documentary style. Wright claims to have approached the project having neither read Pride and Prejudice, nor seen a screen version of Austen other than Sense & Sensibility. Having since acquainted himself with the oeuvre, he calls Austen “one of the first British realists” — a searing social commentator working at a time of romanticism and gothic artifice. Wright was never likely to adhere to the traditional costume-drama route of luvvie performances and mindless dancing.

“I read the script in the pub one afternoon, and I wept bitterly,” he says. “So then I went and read the novel, and I was really shocked by it, because it exploded all my preconceptions of what Austen was. I had imagined it all to be in the picturesque tradition of the painting of that time, yet here was someone who was writing very acute character observation. So, in a sense, she seemed to me to be a realist more than anything else. I’m a huge fan of British realism, and I think it’s probably one of the best things that we’ve done, in terms of cinema, especially. So I decided that that was the tack to take. Since then, I’ve watched the adaptations, and I think that people have looked at the painting of the period and tried to reproduce that cinematically. What we tried to do was completely ignore the painting. We tried to get an aesthetic sense from the writing.”

Wright’s Pride & Prejudice is truly Austen with a difference — but not the kind of difference that will scare the horses. Catering to market demands, Elizabeth Bennet is played by Keira Knightley, who, despite her Austen-esque surname, is no natural Austen heroine. Striding about playing what is probably the juiciest female role in English literature, she is still redolent of a skinny London schoolgirl, all contemporary vernacular and aesthetic.

The Vogue-model presence of Knightley aside, this is an undeniably grittier, more socially profound and simply more human version of Austen. The one exception in the history of Austen adaptations that is frequently cited by the team behind Pride & Prejudice is Roger Michell’s 1995 BBC drama, Persuasion, a contemplatively moody take on an intrinsically darker work.

With characteristic audacity, Wright yanked the setting of Pride & Prejudice backwards by more than a decade to 1797. Jane Austen wrote an earlier, rejected version of the novel, then entitled First Impressions, when she was 21; the version as we know it was published in 1813.

“I thought that the earlier age was more interesting; the world was more in a state of flux. And also, on a purely aesthetic level, I hate empire-line dresses — I think people look like balloons in them,” says Wright. “There’s a lot of post-rationalisation in it. Some ideas come through research, and some ideas are justified through research.”

“This is the muddy-hem version,” says Deborah Moggach, the screenwriter. “This isn’t just a frothy comedy. I think the comedy comes out of real pain and turmoil, and then, of course, it’s funnier. I wanted to be truthful to the core of the book.” Here, the thin-frocked Bennets have to clamber past chickens and livestock to enter an unmanicured Georgian landscape, its shafts of sun thick with feathers and flies. A pig crashes through the kitchen, sizeable testicles on display; the mess of a family of seven clutters surfaces as a giggling gaggle of plain teenage girls squabble beside smeared windows; and a truly surly Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) watches the locals sweat, shout and spill drinks as they stomp and trip their way through the commotion of an Assembly Rooms dance that couldn’t be more removed from the customary Regency bowing and simpering.

But how does a big-budget, star-studded movie tread the middle ground between the stains and shadows of art-house realism and our requirement for a well-loved romance to look easy on the eye? “I always said I wanted it to be beautiful, but not pretty,” says Wright. “One’s natural inclination as an artist is to make things beautiful. I also wanted it to be provincial, and I wanted them to have a laugh.”

The lowing, clucking, hazy beauty of Pride & Prejudice is reminiscent at times of Polanski’s Tess, just as the clamour and dirt are often more characteristic of the cinematic style generally deemed suitable for a rowdy Victorian adaptation, rather than a stiffer Regency period piece. Similarly, the scenery is often more Wuthering Heights than an English Heritage vision of parks, hat shops and soldiers.

Socio-economic realities are not skimmed over: the financial stakes are made clear for a modern audience, and for the first time, the predicament of the matchmaking Mrs Bennet (Brenda Blethyn), a character usually played as a twittering idiot, is comprehensible.

“What is difficult for us to understand now,” says Moggach, “is exactly what is in store for those girls if they don’t get married.”

The team assembled to create these differences includes the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whose work with Mike Leigh on Vera Drake won a Bafta. “I think Joe employed me because he wanted a fresh look on it, so he didn’t get someone who had done a Regency adaptation before,” says Durran. “He wanted it to have a strong provincial theme, and that was the touchstone. Because it was set earlier, we could drop the waistline, and it was altogether a bit scruffier.”

The Bennets’ looser clothes are echoed by their unadorned complexions and more natural hairstyles. “We made them old-fashioned,” says Moggach. “So you can understand why Darcy might look on them as rather hoydenish and country bumpkin.”

With the exception of a lip-glossed and inevitably Hollywood-pleasing Lizzie Bennet, freckles and even slightly discoloured teeth are visible. “Powder was banned. I don’t think I used a powder puff during the whole filming,” says the hair and make-up designer, Fae Hammond. “Hairwise, we just added pieces, rather than using wigs. We didn’t use a make-up base, just a correction palette for continuity purposes, and absolutely nothing was used on the skin of the younger girls. I hope people can relate much more to them, as they’re just young, fresh girls.”

The production designer, Sarah Greenwood, worked with Wright on Charles II. “Setting it earlier made it less hidebound and tight,” she says. “I often feel that productions are sanitised in a way that takes away from them. In the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, it felt like the family lived in a very glossed-over world. Joe and I followed our hearts — we were allowed to create our own world. The one thing we consciously didn’t want to happen was that the girls spent the whole time sitting around sewing.”

Cinematically, contemporary social realism has its own trademark style, one increasingly used in television docu-drama. Pride & Prejudice, all shot on location in the UK, plunges down corridors and pulls the viewer into the room with a fly-on-the-wall proximity to the action.

“It’s the idea of making it less formal and shooting it in the tradition of British realism,” says Wright. “If something is contemporary, people shoot it with zoom lenses and handheld cameras, and if something is period, then they want to shoot it with a static, formal composition. But, actually, zoom lenses are incredibly exciting, because they mean you can move with the moment and improvise. To shoot Pride & Prejudice in a so-called contemporary style brings it into fresh relief.”

The promotional material featuring Knightley, complete with 21st-century eyebrows, is subtly misleading. Pride & Prejudice is, in many ways, a labour of love. It may even change the way in which Austen is filmed and perceived. As Greenwood says: “It’s not to say that you can’t do something with Austen that is very arch and very pure. Who’s to say what is right and wrong? There are different ways of approaching it. I think there will be purists who say, ‘She didn’t mean this,’ but we don’t know what she meant. We can only go back to history and take it from there.”

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Striding about playing what is probably the juiciest female role in English literature, she is still redolent of a skinny London schoolgirl, all contemporary vernacular and aesthetic.

Quote:

A pig crashes through the kitchen, sizeable testicles on display; the mess of a family of seven clutters surfaces as a giggling gaggle of plain teenage girls squabble beside smeared windows; and a truly surly Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) watches the locals sweat, shout and spill drinks as they stomp and trip their way through the commotion of an Assembly Rooms dance that couldn’t be more removed from the customary Regency bowing and simpering.

Quote:

The lowing, clucking, hazy beauty of Pride & Prejudice is reminiscent at times of Polanski’s Tess, just as the clamour and dirt are often more characteristic of the cinematic style generally deemed suitable for a rowdy Victorian adaptation, rather than a stiffer Regency period piece. Similarly, the scenery is often more Wuthering Heights than an English Heritage vision of parks, hat shops and soldiers.

Quote:

Socio-economic realities are not skimmed over: the financial stakes are made clear for a modern audience, and for the first time, the predicament of the matchmaking Mrs Bennet (Brenda Blethyn), a character usually played as a twittering idiot, is comprehensible.

Quote:

The team assembled to create these differences includes the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whose work with Mike Leigh on Vera Drake won a Bafta. “I think Joe employed me because he wanted a fresh look on it, so he didn’t get someone who had done a Regency adaptation The one thing we consciously didn’t want to happen was that the girls spent the whole time sitting around sewing.”

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I think there will be purists who say, ‘She didn’t mean this,’ but we don’t know what she meant. We can only go back to history and take it from there.”

Di of Long Cleeve wrote:

Ppppphhffftttt!

I wants my Jennifer Ehle with the heaving bosom and I wants her now!

I wants my Darcy in a Wet Shirt and I wants him now!

I want Julia Sawalha in her finest hour, playing a 15 year old Lydia when she was 25 and totally looking and behaving like a 15 year old.

I want all that erotic tension. Again. Give me Autumn 1995!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Leoba wrote:

But don't forget to rave for the, slightly bovine, but exquisitely poised Susannah Harker as Jane.