Aargh. Link.
bump
So has anyone else gone yet? Whaddya think?
I enjoyed it tremendously. The coda is only in the US version, BTW. Apparently the test audiences in the US thought it ended abruptly.
I don’t think I will see this --the A&E one is the definitive one for me. I don’t like it when books are hacked up to fit time limits, and I don’t like anachronisms in films–be they manners or props or behavior.
Plus, Keira Knightley is starting to get on my nerves. I do like Donald Sutherland, though.
P&P has been adapted and paid homage to in other films–Bridget Jones springs to mind. I don’t mind that at all–but if you are going to do P&P–then do so.
I might rent it when it comes out on DVD. But Colin Firth–there is no substitute!
I saw it this past weekend. I agree, the A&E miniseries is far more true to the feeling of the book and period, but I liked this more “swoony” rendition nonetheless. It was light-hearted and funny. I enjoyed the performances, especially Donald Sutherland and Judi Dench.
This version made me look at some of the characters differently than I had in the past. I actually made me feel bad for Mr. Collins, instead of just being skeeved out by him. Mary Bennett too, when she started crying at the ball.
I thought Matthew MacFadyen made an excellent Darcy (if more a obviously shy one than Colin Firth’s version). Also, he’s fourteen kinds of hot.
The one thing that really got to me was Caroline Bingley’s sleeveless gown at the Netherfield Ball. It looked ridiculously out of place.
Did anyone else think that Wickham looked like Orlando Bloom’s creepy doppelganger? I found that distracting too.
I really enjoyed the movie overall. But then, also I liked the recent Mansfield Park.
Yes! It was bugging me every time he appeared on-screen.
I know people here think they’ll be annoyed by various details they think are wrong, but remember that people said similar things about the mini-series too, given that it had Darcy in a wet shirt scene and taking a bath, and he and Lizzie kiss at the end (although I always thought that was stupid, since they’d just gotten married!). And now we all love it anyway.
Yep, there’s definitely a few things to quibble about. But it’s still a good movie, and as good an adaptation as can be expected when you take a book and cover it in 2 hrs, although the coda seems dumb. Go, see it, enjoy it, relax…
I haven’t seen the film but I did see a news story about how there are two versions in release. An ‘American’ version with the sugary sweet coda and a Euro version that stays more faithful to the book.
I read Sense and Sensibilty about a year ago and I thought the film did a great adaptation. It’s on of my favortie movies.
Just saw it so dug up this thread.
I liked showing the Bennetts’ shabby gentility, it did drive home why marrying off her daughters was so important to Mrs. Bennett.
Hated the coda.
The movie worked best when it didn’t bother to stay true to the source material but didn’t stray too close to Bronte (Darcy would NEVER propose in the rain - preposterous). Scenes like Darcy coaching Bingley on proposing were really charming.
The scene at Netherfield between Caroline, Elizabeth and Darcy is really disjointed and choppy.
Mr. Collins was WAY to sympathetic. I couldn’t understand why Elizabeth wouldn’t want to marry him - he wasn’t bad looking, wasn’t too pompous, seemed like a nice enough guy - better than winding up starving when Dad died. Likewise Mrs. Bennett was too sympathetic - the only reason Darcy or Bingley would have for not wanting to marry into that family was the poverty - they certainly didn’t show the extreme lack of propriety evident in the Austen book.
What bothered me most was that they forgot it was a comedy. Too brooding and not funny enough.
(And Keira Knightley is beautiful, but needs ten pounds on her, five of it in tits).
I liked it a lot and I’m a bona fide Janeite though they may rip my laurels from me now I suppose. Yes, I commented right in the theatre (after the film finished, I don’t want to go to the special hell) about the Brontefication but I don’t mind it one bit. Source material doesn’t get hurt by adaptations and art deserves better than to be trapped in the definitive. I thought that Mr. Darcy as played by Matthew wossisname was actually a more interesting character than Colin Firth’s gorgeously Byronic take although I’ll always have a swoony spot for Colin Firth. I was disappointed a bit that the spare Bingley sister and her husband were left out but I can see why.
Dangerosa, I disagree entirely that no great want of propriety was shown. The Ball at Netherfield was the same disaster as it was in the book - Mary storming around because she can’t play the piano for as long as she wants, Mrs. Bennet getting tipsy and boasting about the match her daughter is making, Lydia and Kitty running around like a pair of little tramps, Mr. Collins having the sheer nerve to introduce himself. Oof! Poor reserved Mr. Darcy was bound to be shocked.
Saw this over the weekend. You won’t find a much bigger fan of the Firth/Ehle version than me, but I did enjoy this movie. I liked the darker, more realistic look of it, and its greater passion. It’s very rushed, of course, and it was disappointing to see beloved scenes cut and to have such little time to dwell on the minor characters. I think all the people were well-cast and a 5-hour version of this movie would have rivaled the mini-series.
All the scenes with Lydia and/or Wickham were rushed to the point of being completely ineffective. They didn’t spend enough time with the younger sisters to even be able to distinguish one from the other. Mr. Collins was good but as a previous posters mentioned, he appears too sympathetic. You need more time with him to be truly annoyed by him.
I liked Darcy except that most of his lines were delivered machine-gun fashion. He is certainly gorgeous. I liked his dark, disheveled look, especially in the scene at the end when he’s walking up through the mist.
As for humour, I did like Caroline Bingley’s line during one of the balls, which I don’t remember from the book, about how she expected at any minute for a piglet to be introduced and for them to be expected to chase it. I also liked the scene where Bingley is rehearsing his proposal in front of Darcy.
Saw it with the ladyfriend this past weekend. I’ve never read the book nor seen the A&E miniseries so I’m probably not qualified to comment but I agreed that Wickham felt like an afterthought or something and the sisters seemed to be Lizzie, Jane & “the rest”. When Lizzie got the letter saying the one ran off, I had no idea who the li’l runaway was.
Was pretty pleased with the film until the end (I guess that’d be the “coda” you’re all deriding) which felt tacked on, cheesy and didn’t add a thing.
Chick flick but much better than most chick flicks.
I just saw it yesterday as well (the one other guy in there said, “Oh, good, another guy” when I walked in with my girlfriend), and thought it was quite good, minus that crap at the end. I read the book a couple of years ago so some of it wasn’t so fresh in my mind, but I thought they did a pretty good job of showing how improper the Bennetts were compared to what Darcy expected. The Orlando Bloom clone was a bit off-putting - I kept thinking, “Is it? No, it’s not him. Is it?”
Also, I don’t believe Lizzie asked Darcy to dance, at least not outright like that. She hinted at it by saying something about how a good way for a man to meet others or something was to ask the girl to dance. To which he replied something along the lines of “I try to avoid [dancing] whenever I can.”
Cripes. I searched to see if there was another thread on this too…
Anyway I loved it. The coda didn’t really work for me either, but it wasn’t awful.
I really missed the dinner, with Darcy seated across from Mrs. Bennett while she goes on and one about Jane marrying Bingley, to Elizabeth’s horror. And Mr. Collins’ speech. And Mary shouldn’t have been a “lousy” pianist, only a “pedantic” one with limited skill - she practices far too much to have been that bad at it (I’d have taken a decent pianst with a lousy voice). She is supposed to be technical better than Elizabeth. There was no sense for me that she was hogging the piano - more that Mr. Bennett was pulling her away because she was so lousy. Likewise, by that time in the book there was no distinction between the Kitty and Lydia or any of the other girls running around the ball. I saw them misbehave, I didn’t see Darcy or Caroline notice - which is what I needed. And the ball was too crowded for them to stick out.
I didn’t get the sense that Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were terribly mismatched - quite the opposite, they seemed rather close.
The time compression bugged me - not the “cut these scenes to make it fit” but the “compress the story so it happens over a few months instead of an entire year.” Why would Lady Catherine show up the very night Bingley proposed in the middle of the night? Someone call her cell phone? There was no reason not to let a few days pass (though I liked the change from the walk in the garden to having the Bennett’s all listening at the door). Likewise, no reason for Elizabeth to run off with the Gardner’s the day she gets back from Kent. Why make a point of cutting the Gardner’s children - that made Mrs. Bennett’s claim that Mr. Gardner should be the one to pay off Wickham reasonable.
Brenda Blethyn is too old for Mrs. Bennett - by Regency standards Mrs. Bennett should have gotten married by 21, Jane is 21, so Mrs. Bennett should be mid 40s. Mr. Bennett could have a few years on her - but Donald Sutherland is 70. Pretty old to have your oldest daughter be 21 by Regency standards.
I know some of this is nitpicky, but I’m one of those people who reads the darn book at least once a year. I did enjoy the movie, but I won’t see it a second time - for me, it lacked the charm and humor of the book - which is why I read it.
I enjoyed the movie well enough. I didn’t think it was a terrible adaptation – obviously it can’t hold up to the mini-series version, which had 6 hours to tell the story. So I don’t think it’s fair to compare this version to that. A better comparison, I think, is to compare it to earlier adaptations. It did feel too dark, though (the Brontefication that’s been mentioned). Emma and Sense & Sensibility were both better adaptations, IMO --both managed to keep that light Jane Austen touch, even when the characters were moving through their bad times. And it certainly couldn’t touch Persuasion which is my favorite adaptation (and book). I would put the new P&P at the end of the pack, side by side with Mansfield Park (which I just rewatched). And to tell you the truth, I enjoyed Mansfield Park better – it had serious problems (the revamping of Fanny’s character being the most egregious) but still felt like Jane Austen.
Good stuff – I did like most of the cast. Ms. Knightley got on my nerves a bit with her constant facial fidgiting, but she was pretty and lively and seemed intelligent, as Lizzy always ought. Rosamond Pike made a lovely Jane. Bingley, Darcy, and Wickham were well cast; as was Charlotte Lucas. Kitty & Lydia were interchangable, but adequate. Mary was too pretty, and not pretentious enough. Collins was also too good-looking and, like Mary, not pretentious enough. Mr. & Mrs. Bennett were too old, but I always enjoy Donald Sutherland anyway – although his Mr. Bennett was not quite sarcastic enough.
Worst stuff – there were several scenes when I wanted to crawl into the screen and put a bonnet on Lizzy’s head! Lizzy would not have gone into town bareheaded! And she went to visit Charlotte (and, later, Lady Catherine) without a hat! Wrong, wrong, wrong – especially in those scenes that make it clear that everyone in her group was properly attired (in the scene when the girls meet Wickham, every one of her sisters is dressed for the street and wearing a bonnet, and there is Lizzy with an old shawl wrapped around her and a bare head!). There was even one scene when she goes into Meryton without a hat, and with her hair hanging down her back! I was also very distracted by the final proposal scene when Lizzy is out in the garden in her nightgown & robe. It would have been okay for her hair to be down in that scene (it was her own garden, and in the morning), but she ought to have had at least a housedress on. And then, to make it all worse, up comes Darcy – looking very Heathcliff-ish, with no hat and no tie!!! – coming to call on a lady before breakfast! And Caroline Bingley’s dress for the Netherfield Ball was terrible! I really liked the costumes overall – I thought it was a neat idea to set the movie back a few years – but these errors really irritated the shit out of me. Especially because they would have been so easy to get right.
My mom and daughter both enjoyed the movie more than I did (neither has read the book) – of course, they aren’t as picky as I am, either.
Gurinder Chadha adapted B &P and directed it…not Mira Nair. The last thing I remember from Mira Nair is Monsoon Wedding.
She did last year’s Reese Witherspoon Vanity Fair, which I haven’t seen.
Oh yeah, I saw that actually. The visuals were stunning but the script rearranged a lot of the novel. Although poor Becky is in for a bit of a reevaluation anyway…a much more interesting individual than limp-wristed Amelia Smedley. Still, she’s hardly what Reese Witherspoon was playing.
I think this is why I liked it 
I hate Jane Austen’s writing (why do they inflict that crap on hapless English Majors? That’s the sort of writing you should choose to be exposed to, like Danielle Steele) , this book in particular, but they managed to turn Mansfield Park into an interesting movie, so I thought I’d give this one a go. It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it was a lot less painful than the book, mostly because it had humorous moments. 7/10.
One of my biggest complaints was Charlotte Lucas justifying marrying Mr. Collins because she was “poor”. She wasn’t poor - she was the eldest daughter of the Sir William and Lady Lucas. They were the wealthiest family in the town. I also questioned Lady Catherine’s visiting the house at night. I didn’t get the feeling it was the same day as Darcy’s proposal, but it was shockingly improper. The lack of proper clothing also bothered me - both the haberdashery and Lizzie;'s going walking in her nightgown. I just down see a well-brought-up young lady going out without being properly attired.
The whole thing seemed rushed, but I don’t know how it couldn’t given the time constraints.
StG