Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Jane Austen For Dummies (64 page)
2005:
So what chance did the 2005 commercial film of
Pride and Prejudice
have? With memories of Colin Firth as Darcy, the dour, scowling Matthew MacFayden seemed more like Heathcliffe who'd missed the stop for
Wuthering Heights
and got off the train by mistake in Austenland. While many viewers loved the film, many devoted Austen readers were disappointed with the Brontefication of the story in terms of its darkness, placing scenes outside in storm and wind borrowed from
Jane Eyre
. The DVD is out if you'd like to buy or rent it.
ITV/BBC was the first to tackle
Mansfield Park
in the form of a miniseries, shown in the U.S. on PBS-TV's
Masterpiece Theater
. The telling of the story sticks closely to the novel. Nick Farrell played the hero, Edmund Bertram, to Sylvestra Le Touzel's appropriately sensitive and introspective Fanny Price. Anna Massey is terrific as the cruel and insinuating Aunt Norris. Angela Pleasance as the placid Lady Bertram has a great moment when, hearing that her dangerously ill son Tom has just been brought home, her sedentary character leaps from her sofa and runs down a flight of stairs. It's on VHS and DVD.
I had the pleasure of hearing Ms. Le Touzel speak about Fanny at the 2003 Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America in Winchester, England, where I found her insights penetrating and sensitive.
Patricia Rozema's 1999
Mansfield Park,
which is called just that â “Patricia Rozema's
Mansfield Park
” â is a fine movie in its own right. It's just not Austen's
Mansfield Park.
Written and directed by . . . you guessed it, Patricia Rozema, this film reinvents the passive heroine Fanny Price into a self- possessed young woman who writes stories (using Austen's own juvenile works) and â like Richardson's cinematic
Tom Jones
â talks directly to the camera. Clearly influenced by late-20th-century neocolonial academic literary criticism, the film emphasizes in varied ways that the wealth of Mansfield Park comes from the slave trade. Nobel-prize-winning British playwright Harold Pinter plays a villainous and creepy Sir Thomas Bertram â who in the novel isn't particularly villainous and creepy.
Mansfield Park
is on Britain's ITV's list of new Austen television productions slated for UK release in the fall of 2006. Maggie Wadey, who did the eerie
Northanger Abbey
1986 miniseries, is doing the screenplay. I'm hoping that Wadey stays close to this intriguing, deep, and different Austen novel â different because the heroine is unusually passive and timid.
Emma
continues to receive popular coverage in the media as well:
Emma
was first in the hands of adapters for a 1948 live, BBC television show that ran for almost two hours.
In 1954, NBC's
Kraft Television Theater
did a live, one-hour version, starring Felicia Montealegre in the title role, with Roddy McDowell, graduating from child roles to playing Mr. Elton.
Three years earlier, Miss Montealegre became the wife of the prominent conductor and composer of the musical
West Side Story,
Leonard Bernstein. That fact has nothing to do with Austen, but may help you win a game of trivia.
In 1960, the BBC did a six-part, 180-minute miniseries based on
Emma
. The same year CBS's
Camera Three
series offered a one-hour
Emma
.
The novel finally received more coverage in 1972, when BBC-2 offered a five-part miniseries by our old friend Denis Constanduros (of the two
Sense and Sensibility
miniseries, discussed earlier). It's on DVD and VHS.
The screen then had to wait 25 years for another
Emma
adaptation, but it was worth the wait. Amy Heckerling wrote and directed the hit film
Clueless,
the title of which perfectly describes Emma, star and centerpiece of her own novel,
Emma.
Resetting the novel in a contemporary Beverly Hills High School, Heckerling's film reminds us that the experiences that Austen's Emma endures are so universal that
Clueless
's Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone, endures similar events. As Austen knew, human nature never changes. When the news finally came out that
Clueless
was, indeed, based on the 1815-novel
Emma,
teenagers who loved the film were shocked that Jane Austen could be relevant. It's on DVD.
Placing the novel back in its historical context, Doug McGrath's 1996, two-hour commercial film,
Emma,
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, was also a hit. With gorgeous costumes and wonderful location settings, the film makes occasional departures from the novel â such as turning the timid little Harriet Smith, who's Emma's project in the novel, into the bull-in-the-china-shop Toni Collette, who gained weight to play the role. Placing Emma and Mr. Knightley (played by the suave, but too-short-for-the-role Jeremy Northam) outside shooting arrows at a target is a nice little tip of the hat to the 1940 MGM
Pride and Prejudice,
where Elizabeth (Greer Garson) surprises Darcy (Lawrence Olivier) with her skill with the bow. (And no, the bow and arrow scene is not in the novel.) Ewan Macgregor plays Frank Churchill. But departures from Austen's novel aside, Paltrow is a charming Emma, showing how sincere Emma is in trying to help those around her, while remaining clueless. And she does a great British accent. It's on DVD.
Another
Emma,
this time a 107-minute television version produced by Britain's ITV and the U.S. Arts & Entertainment cable station, came out in 1996. A young Kate Beckinsale plays Emma in this film, written by Andrew Davies. The petite Samantha Morton is more like the novel's Harriet Smith than Toni Collette's in the McGrath film. Mark Strong is an appropriately tall Mr. Knightley. This is available on VHS and DVD, and it will be re-released on British TV for ITV's Austen extravaganza.
