By Peter Craven for The Age
October 22, 2005
It's odd to think that Pride and Prejudice hasn't actually been made into a movie since the 1940 version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Odd, partly because that bit of casting went deep into the collective memory - Larry, in particular, at 31 was the platonic idea of Darcy, all sneer and sparkle - and odd, too, because the 1995 TV version with Jennifer Ehle was one of those adaptations for television - like the Jeremy Irons Brideshead or the Derek Jacobi I, Claudius - that seem more significant than any film could be.
читать дальшеIndeed, the collective female furore about Colin Firth's Darcy in the TV version - largely inexplicable to the male eye, straight or gay - led on to Bridget Jones and to the whole cinematic cult of Austen and her Victorian successors, which led film critic Derek Malcolm to say that you could hardly go out these days without wearing a bonnet.
Well, now we have a new, handsome Pride and Prejudice, full of ducks and pigs and lavish country vistas, and featuring as Elizabeth Bennet one Keira Knightley, she of Bend it like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean.
The thought of Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet, one of the more self-possessed comic heroines since Shakespeare's Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, caused the kind of apprehension that greeted the news that Leonardo Di Caprio was to play Romeo. It wasn't that she was literally too young - Elizabeth Bennet is a marriageable 20-odd - but that adulthood (in the sense of maturity, wit and ripeness) seemed to fall on girls a bit faster in far-off Regency days than it does today.
Elizabeth is the best of the Bennet bunch in Pride and Prejudice - including noble, yearning Jane. She's her father's daughter and Mr Bennet is a cynical delight. Mrs Bennet is one of those fatuous lumps of womanhood who can never get beyond the feminine view that a good marriage is better than any other fate.
Of course, Elizabeth, like any humour-dominated type in Ben Jonson or Moliere, is prejudiced against Mr Darcy, dark, handsome and proud as Lucifer.
It is an extraordinary image of life, Pride and Prejudice - as great as As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing - and we know it like the backs of our hands.
The good news is that the Keira Knightley/Matthew MacFadyen Pride and Prejudice is likely to bring pleasure to the millions of people - most, not all, of them women - who think the world was a better place in Regency smocks and tight trousers, at least when Jane Austen was calling the tune.
This is an easy-to-take, sweeping, countrified Pride and Prejudice. The director, Joe Wright, who hadn't read the book - and whose claims to fame are TV things such as the Rufus Sewell Charles II and Timothy Spall losing it in Bodily Harm - didn't want things to be too "posh" so he's muddied them up.
This makes Austen seem earthier and her world more like something that falls somewhere between Fielding's and Hardy's. Historically this is fair enough even if it is a bit at variance with the tone of the book and the kind of visualisation it evokes.
Everything looks a bit more slatternly, the Bennet girls are rowdier, nothing is all that clean-looking and the ball is much jiggier and more folksy than the usual neoclassical stateliness.
What goes along with this is a more stormy and messy naturalisation of Austen's vision. Brenda Blethyn is superb as Mrs Bennet, dotty and vulgar in her pursuit of marriageable chaps for her daughters, but there's no surrender to comic type.
Donald Sutherland - who hasn't been heard with an English accent very often since his walk-on bit-playing in The Avengers 40 years ago - turns Mr Bennet into the most complex, compassionate, neo-Rembrandtian figure in a way that transforms the brilliant naysayer of the original into something more human but also more touchy-feely. It's hard to object, though stylistically the upshot is more Victorian than it is Jane Austen.
So what about the leads? Will you quiver, will you shiver at the latest incarnations of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy? Well, as they say on Little Britain - Scottish accents, please - "Mebbe yairs, mebbe noo."
Knightley has always been easy on the eye and she is ravishingly shot by Roman Osin in what is pretty consistently a long hymn to the "barbarous beauty" of Britain. Her hair is dark, she's fresh, even tanned, not peaches and cream, and as Elizabeth she gives the best performance she's given so far in a "British" film, vowels peaching, nose wrinkling.
It's not a patch on her American girl in The Jacket with Adrien Brody, where the nose thing vanished as though it had never been. But although someone should have taken the scissors to this particular mannerism, Knightley is a pretty presentable Elizabeth Bennet. She's a lot more natural than she normally is and there are times when she's overtaken by genuine poise, where she looks absolutely self-possessed.
It's not a great performance but it has some terrific moments - including the confrontation with Lady Catherine de Bourg where, a bit unbelievably, Knightley holds her own with Judi Dench.
So not an Elizabeth Bennet that will banish memories of Jennifer Ehle and Greer Garson - perhaps least of all for older Janeites - but one that is likely to communicate by a spirit of empathy with her contemporaries and probably get some votes, for all its friskiness and touches of toughness, from their elders.
And her Darcy? Well Matthew MacFadyen is obviously a fine actor - I would like to have seen his Prince Hal opposite Michael Gambon's Falstaff in Henry IV at Britain's National Theatre recently - and he's got good eyes and the ability to register the softer aspects of Darcy at a glance.
You miss the Olivier hauteur and savage intensity of style and I suspect a lot of the ladies will miss Colin Firth's "weight". He doesn't strike me as an ideal contemporary Darcy - who would that be? - but he'll do.
He sometimes looks more like a self-conscious schoolboy than he does like a morally upright version of Byron. The fact that he's a slightly boyish Darcy, a bit wispy, at least makes him look compatible with Knightley in a way an actor with a huge presence like Clive Owen just wouldn't.
So this Pride and Prejudice is a bit of a chamber music for kids' orchestra, with chooks in the background and plenty of dirt and rain and tousled hair and some adult guest players deepening the sense of reality.
The exception to the slightly anachronistic complexity - typified by Sutherland - is Judi Dench's Lady Catherine de Bourg. I wouldn't have cast her. I would have gone for Maggie Smith ahead of her and Vanessa Redgrave ahead of either of them, but Dench is superb and superbly on the note. The old monster of snobbery is utterly human and executed with brutal grandeur, with not the faintest bid for sympathy.
It's the flintiest and most purely Austen-like thing in this soft, earth-coloured chocolate box of a Pride and Prejudice.
And when Darcy comes good and Elizabeth sees the light, hearts will flutter at something way beyond romance.
This is an easy-to-take, sweeping, countrified Pride and Prejudice. The director, Joe Wright, who hadn't read the book - and whose claims to fame are TV things such as the Rufus Sewell Charles II and Timothy Spall losing it in Bodily Harm - didn't want things to be too "posh" so he's muddied them up.
This makes Austen seem earthier and her world more like something that falls somewhere between Fielding's and Hardy's. Historically this is fair enough even if it is a bit at variance with the tone of the book and the kind of visualisation it evokes.
Everything looks a bit more slatternly, the Bennet girls are rowdier, nothing is all that clean-looking and the ball is much jiggier and more folksy than the usual neoclassical stateliness.
What goes along with this is a more stormy and messy naturalisation of Austen's vision. Brenda Blethyn is superb as Mrs Bennet, dotty and vulgar in her pursuit of marriageable chaps for her daughters, but there's no surrender to comic type.
Donald Sutherland - who hasn't been heard with an English accent very often since his walk-on bit-playing in The Avengers 40 years ago - turns Mr Bennet into the most complex, compassionate, neo-Rembrandtian figure in a way that transforms the brilliant naysayer of the original into something more human but also more touchy-feely. It's hard to object, though stylistically the upshot is more Victorian than it is Jane Austen.
So what about the leads? Will you quiver, will you shiver at the latest incarnations of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy? Well, as they say on Little Britain - Scottish accents, please - "Mebbe yairs, mebbe noo."
Knightley has always been easy on the eye and she is ravishingly shot by Roman Osin in what is pretty consistently a long hymn to the "barbarous beauty" of Britain. Her hair is dark, she's fresh, even tanned, not peaches and cream, and as Elizabeth she gives the best performance she's given so far in a "British" film, vowels peaching, nose wrinkling.
It's not a patch on her American girl in The Jacket with Adrien Brody, where the nose thing vanished as though it had never been. But although someone should have taken the scissors to this particular mannerism, Knightley is a pretty presentable Elizabeth Bennet. She's a lot more natural than she normally is and there are times when she's overtaken by genuine poise, where she looks absolutely self-possessed.
It's not a great performance but it has some terrific moments - including the confrontation with Lady Catherine de Bourg where, a bit unbelievably, Knightley holds her own with Judi Dench.
So not an Elizabeth Bennet that will banish memories of Jennifer Ehle and Greer Garson - perhaps least of all for older Janeites - but one that is likely to communicate by a spirit of empathy with her contemporaries and probably get some votes, for all its friskiness and touches of toughness, from their elders.
And her Darcy? Well Matthew MacFadyen is obviously a fine actor - I would like to have seen his Prince Hal opposite Michael Gambon's Falstaff in Henry IV at Britain's National Theatre recently - and he's got good eyes and the ability to register the softer aspects of Darcy at a glance.
You miss the Olivier hauteur and savage intensity of style and I suspect a lot of the ladies will miss Colin Firth's "weight". He doesn't strike me as an ideal contemporary Darcy - who would that be? - but he'll do.
He sometimes looks more like a self-conscious schoolboy than he does like a morally upright version of Byron. The fact that he's a slightly boyish Darcy, a bit wispy, at least makes him look compatible with Knightley in a way an actor with a huge presence like Clive Owen just wouldn't.
So this Pride and Prejudice is a bit of a chamber music for kids' orchestra, with chooks in the background and plenty of dirt and rain and tousled hair and some adult guest players deepening the sense of reality.
The exception to the slightly anachronistic complexity - typified by Sutherland - is Judi Dench's Lady Catherine de Bourg. I wouldn't have cast her. I would have gone for Maggie Smith ahead of her and Vanessa Redgrave ahead of either of them, but Dench is superb and superbly on the note. The old monster of snobbery is utterly human and executed with brutal grandeur, with not the faintest bid for sympathy.
It's the flintiest and most purely Austen-like thing in this soft, earth-coloured chocolate box of a Pride and Prejudice.
And when Darcy comes good and Elizabeth sees the light, hearts will flutter at something way beyond romance.
Статья :: For our Knightley pleasure
By Peter Craven for The Age
October 22, 2005
It's odd to think that Pride and Prejudice hasn't actually been made into a movie since the 1940 version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Odd, partly because that bit of casting went deep into the collective memory - Larry, in particular, at 31 was the platonic idea of Darcy, all sneer and sparkle - and odd, too, because the 1995 TV version with Jennifer Ehle was one of those adaptations for television - like the Jeremy Irons Brideshead or the Derek Jacobi I, Claudius - that seem more significant than any film could be.
читать дальше
October 22, 2005
It's odd to think that Pride and Prejudice hasn't actually been made into a movie since the 1940 version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Odd, partly because that bit of casting went deep into the collective memory - Larry, in particular, at 31 was the platonic idea of Darcy, all sneer and sparkle - and odd, too, because the 1995 TV version with Jennifer Ehle was one of those adaptations for television - like the Jeremy Irons Brideshead or the Derek Jacobi I, Claudius - that seem more significant than any film could be.
читать дальше