I've waited months for this?
As I walked out of the movie theater last night, I overheard a man tell his wife, “She did such a great job. I didn’t like Keira Knightley in Love Actually, but I think she acted very well in this movie.”
I just shook my head and sighed.
There were many things wrong with this latest Pride and Prejudice adaptation—a disjointed script that often felt patched together with condensed passages from the novel, a few scenes that were more Bronte than Austen, the lack of a relationship between Lizzy and her father, various historical inaccuracies (I’ll leave the folks at AustenBlog to quibble over those details)—but the biggest failing was the inability of Keira Knightley to accurately portray Elizabeth Bennet.
I didn’t expect this new version to be a carbon copy of the five-hour 1995 BBC miniseries, which has become the benchmark for Austen adaptations. Given the time constraints, I knew certain parts of the novel would have to be cut. But I didn’t expect to dislike Lizzy, one of my favorite literary heroines, so thoroughly in this new version.
Knightley couldn’t rid herself of certain modern expressions and movements that seemed entirely out of character. And her manners! Her Lizzy was bratty and immature and often impolite. The manner and tone she took when declining Mr. Collins’s offer of marriage were entirely inappropriate—she was almost yelling at him. Lizzy was sharp-tongued and strong-willed, but she was never rude or condescending.
Knightley didn’t shine in the moments she was supposed to—the scene of Darcy’s first proposal, her encounter with Lady Catherine. Instead of self-assured, she came across as insolent and annoying. This wasn’t entirely her fault; some of Lizzy’s best lines in those scenes were cut or re-written from the text in the novel, and the scenes were altogether too short. But even if she were using the dialogue directly from the novel, the manner in which she delivered the lines was out of character.
I keep trying to keep an open mind about it, but it just was not Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet.
Despite my dislike of Lizzy, I did enjoy several of the other performances. Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy was surprisingly good. (I say surprisingly because as a Colin Firth devotee, I was predisposed to be extra critical.) He was a different Darcy than Firth’s, but still a good one. Judi Dench was excellent as Lady Catherine, Tom Hollander’s portrayal of Mr. Collins was spot on, and Brenda Blethyn’s Mrs. Bennet managed to remain ridiculous without the excessive shrieking that became a little grating in the 1995 series.
But the whole story just moved too quickly. We didn’t have time to get to know any of these characters, and too many lines were crammed in. Mr. Bennet’s remark to Lizzy after her refusal of Mr. Collins, about her being a stranger to one of her parents from that moment on, was delivered too quickly, ruining the comic effect. A few times I noticed that certain conversations felt disjointed, as though the writer tried to include as much of a scene from the novel as possible by keeping some phrases intact and then omitting key phrases between them.
Some thought the final scene, with Elizabeth and Darcy sitting at Pemberley entirely at ease with each other, was too cheesy, but I actually really liked it. The penultimate scene, however, was ridiculous. Lizzie and Darcy just happened to be walking in the same field at the same ungodly hour of the morning in attire that was entirely inappropriate for view by anyone outside of one’s nuclear family. He declares “I love, love, love you” and then, after she accepts his offer of marriage, they walk to her house, where Darcy (still in his pajamas) proceeds to ask Mr. Bennet for Lizzy’s hand in marriage. No respectable man at the time would have waltzed in with his beloved at dawn in his pajamas and asked the woman’s father’s permission unless he wanted the father to raise some serious objections about the marriage. It just wasn’t Jane Austen. Her heroes and heroines feel very passionately, but this doesn’t cloud their judgment. Mr. Darcy would never have gone to Mr. Bennet in such an improper manner.
I feel like I’m being too harsh on the movie. It was actually very well done, but it’s pretty clear that it was made without much real understanding of Austen. Although I guess if they had done that, the movie likely wouldn’t have made any money. As for me, I think I’ll return to Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.
