Just saw a preview of this, and it’s really well done. Keira Knightly is right on target at Elizabeth Bennet – Darcy is pretty swoonworthy (and Wickham is a major studmuffin). The whole cast is wonderful – Brenda Blethyn and Donald Sutherland play the senior Bennets. Nice visuals, they stuck pretty close to the original (let’s face it, the original dialogue is wonderful, what’s to improve?), though they added a coda of Darcy and Lizzie married that was totally unnecessary.
Complete chick flick – but if you’re a chick, you’ll enjoy it.
Hmm… and I do trust your taste in movies,
but the commercial makes it look awful. Kind of like the 1940 movie where the used the names, but ditched the plot.
Is it on a level with the 6 hour A&E/BBC miniseries?
There was a coda? I went to see it with friends and it just suddenly ended in the study with Elizabeth and her father and us going “Huh? Why are the credits rolling?” It progresses very, very fast compared to the BBC series. This is especially noticeable in the beginning, where Jane goes to Netherfield Park about 10 minutes into the movie. If you keep comparing the two versions you’ll notice how much this version cuts out so you should try not to think about it. It is an adaptation, after all, and don’t forget that the BBC version is 6 hours long. It also concentrates more on Lizzie and Darcy’s relationship and is a fair bit darker and less cheerful. Comparisons aside I would say they are both good movies which I like equally and the new version does not suck like I was afraid it would
To me - it’s like Bride & Prejudice, the Mira Nair-directed Indian adaptation. It will never, ever hold a candle to the BBC 6-hour - pretty much one of the best movies ever made, up their with the Philadelphia Story, Casablanca, etc. But I would never expect it to.
Having said that - heck, it’s Pride & Prejudice! You gotta see it! And it appears that the makers, like with B&P, have really tried to give it a great shot, even while fitting it into a 2-hour movie.
So yeah, WordWife and I are planning on a date night this weekend.
I’ve never seen the miniseries, so I can’t compare it to that. Saw Bride and Prejudice last spring and loved it, and went back and reread the book, for the first time in 20 years, after that. B&P obviously takes serious liberties with the plot – dropping some characters and transforming others – but it doesn’t pretend to be a faithful version, so I was fine with it. So, yes, I’ve read the book in the last few months and it was pretty fresh in my mind. (Also caught the first 10 minutes of the Greer Garson/Laurence Oliviet version, which I’ve never seen, on TV a couple of weeks ago – but my beau was wielding the remote and changed the channel when I told him there weren’t any car crashes.)
I thought this version was pretty damn faithful to the book. We got there a few minutes late (it was one of those EW free showings – and those rascals start on time, no previews!), so they were at the ball where everyone meets when we walked in. (I loved how they shot the ball scenes, btw – making them seem very crowded and chaotic, and tracking one character or another through the crush.) Anyway, so I don’t know exactly how they started it. As far as the coda is concerned – after the scene in the study with Elizabeth and her father,
they switch to Pemberly, after Elizabeth and Darcy are married, where the two of them are en deshabille (sp., sorry) on the patio, clearly after some hot and heavy action elsewhere, and Darcy asks what he should call her – “Mrs. Darcy when I’m cross?” “No, Mrs. Darcy when you’re incandescently happy.” So, duh, he starts calling her Mrs. Darcy and covering her face with kisses.
That didn’t work for me – the young woman I took (one of my underlings – most of my movie-going pals are male) agreed.
I saw the preview and was so disgusted, I’m not going to put myself through the whole movie. It’s just another slaughtering if the real thing to serve 21st century sensibilities without any regard whatsoever for what made the original charming, interesting, and enduring. They did it to Mansfield Park–they did it to Vanity Fair–now they’ve done it to Pride & Prejudice. Crude, naive, hackneyed, shallow, and with a really ugly cast. I basically want to picket outside the theatre.
I mean, come on people! Elizabeth Bennet asks Mr. Darcy to dance? Get a grip!
The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane panned it, citing its “Brontefication” of the story’s tone (that is, making it unduly OTT melodramatic and Romantic in its direction and iconography) and its trimming of the novel’s subplots, and concluding that any resemblance to Jane Austen’s novel was entirely coincidental.
Sattua, Scrivener – obviously I’m too much of an idiot to realize the horrendous damage they did to the book by leaving out a couple of subpplots in order to reduce it to a two-hour movie, and the profound distortions of 1797 English society in their anachronistic depictions of it. I feel just terrible about having enjoyed a good story, sparkling dialogue, and excellent acting.
Twickster, you must see the A&E version, immediately.
It’s wonderful. (Wickham is horribly miscast, but everyone else is perfect.)
I saw it right before it left theaters - it isn’t bad. And it is (for me) easier to deal with the changes from the source when it’s modern, set in India, and turned into a musical. Plus, it’s got the guy from Lost as Bingley.
I will check out the A&E version – but probably not for a couple of months. I try to keep myself at no more than three renditions of the same story in any given year.
I’m not going to see this new one. The A&E/BBC one was definitive in my opinion. Anything else is bound to pale in comparison to that. Plus this movie is made by the same guy who made Love, Actually which is on my all-time hate list.
[QUOTE=amarinth] Twickster, you must see the A&E version, immediately.
It’s wonderful. (Wickham is horribly miscast, but everyone else is perfect.)
I thought the guy who played Wickham was great. He was effortlessly suave and confident. I had no problem believing he could make the ladies swoon the way he did.
Fans of this latest take on P&P may find this article on Chatsworth interesting. Chatsworth, which stood in for Darcy’s “Pemberley” estate in the film, is the truly grand crib owned (and run as a tourist attraction) by Debo, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, a.k.a. the youngest and last remaining Mitford sister. Just how grand is it? Try 175 rooms maintained by a staff of 600, on an estate of 35,000 acres. (I’m trying to imagine the property tax. That, and the dusting.) The art collection on display in Chatsworth, though legendary, is hardly limited to the Grand Masters and their pre-modern ilk, sporting as it does several avant-garde portraits by Lucien Freud and myriad knick-knacks revealing its mistress’ eclectic and eccentric tastes.
Did the director opt to neither hide nor shoot around the Freuds and the Elvis memorabilia? Oh my, that would have been naughty of him… tsk, tsk!
Yep, definitely looking forward to renting it, esp. for the real estate porn. Now, that’s naughty!
I also thought the 6-hour miniseries was just about perfect. Bride and Prejudice was a very enjoyable Bollywood-Austen hybrid, although the non-Indian male leads were fairly lousy, IMHO. Nitin Chandra Ganatra as the Mr. Collins character was just superb, though—he and Nadira Babbar as the pushy, kvetchy mother absolutely made the movie.
I agree that the new movie version of P&P was a little “Bronteified” and romantic-comedy-ish, but it was still a fun watch. twickster, that “coda” scene sounds appallingly sucky, though—the version I saw here in the Netherlands didn’t include it.
The coda scene must have been dropped - I didn’t see it here in Australia. Never saw a scene with Lizzie asking Darcy to dance, either.
It’s a bit unfair to compare it to a 6hr mini-series, really, it’s just too hard to get a whole book into 2hrs. But I thought they did a great job with this movie. My only complaint is that the emphasis was given to romance rather than comedy (Brontefication), but it’s not like the romance isn’t there in the original.
Mr Collins was great, and Mr Darcy was good too, considering he had to live up to Colin Firth’s take on the role. Judi Dench played Lady Catherine exactly as you would expect. Keira Knightley was a bit toothy for my liking, but I do think she understood the character. I was most diappointed in the guy they got to play Wickham, he seemed really uptight for someone of such loose morals!
It was fun and enjoyable, and didn’t trample on the original (I’m looking at you, Mansfield Park), which is all you can expect from an adaptation of a book.
I just saw a (very brief) exerpt that has made me give up all hope.
The scene where she’s recieved his letter and is meeting with him, and tells him she will not marry him…and is shouting at him…no…no, no, no. The whole idea that natural human emotions are entwined (and sometimes smothered) by society and convention is integral to the book. The entwining is very much the point, Elizabeth would never have shouted. Struck me as very wrong.
I haven’t seen Mira Nair’s Bride & P yet, but I’ve seen the A&E miniseries. My favorite take is the 1940 B&W film with Greer Garson, Lawrence Olivier, and Edna May Oliver as the horse-faced Lady Catherine De Bourgh – and a crucial assist on the script by Aldous Huxley.
If you haven’t seen this, perhaps this link to [URL=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032943/quotes from the movie will persuade you to see it…