Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice
A Frodo's Notebook Movie Review
by Timothy Rezendes - Managing Editor

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been adapted for film and television at least ten times. Some adaptations, like the critically acclaimed 1995 BBC miniseries, try to stay true to the novel while some, like the 2003 film set among Mormon college students, take an awful lot of liberties. Joe Wright's new film, starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet and Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy, is one of the former. And, though it doesn't match the word for word accuracy of the five hour BBC version, this newest version succeeds in being an excellent film.

When adapting any book for the screen, the filmmakers' primary responsibility should be to the tell the same story as the book in a manner befitting the medium. As part of their endeavor, the filmmakers should strive to please fans of the book while also attracting new fans who have no prior relationship with the material. Attracting and entertaining new fans is relatively easy to do, but pleasing fans of the book your movie is based on is an extremely difficult task. With Pride and Prejudice the challenge was particularly daunting.

Austen's Novel has been gathering fans for nearly two hundred years, many of whom have read the book dozens of times. Some of those super-fans will never be satisfied with a film adaptation of their beloved novel that does not keep every line of dialogue intact. There is little a feature film can do to satisfy those fans, as there is simply not enough time in a two to three hour space to do every moment of the novel justice. For more casual fans, however, and even for super-fans who are a bit more open minded, Wright's Pride and Prejudice is a triumph. Though a few minor characters and a couple of scenes are missing, the story is the same one told by Austen, and it is told well.

It is worth commenting that if taken too far, the desire to please fans of the source material can produce a film that is of little value to those who are not familiar with the original. The latest in the Harry Potter film series suffers from this ailment. Goblet of Fire succeeds masterfully in rendering visually a series of scenes from the novel. But it does not come to more than that. With little introduction and practically no transitional material between major events, the movie holds little or no appeal for anyone who is not familiar with the novel. Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, presents a complete story from beginning to end: one that stays true to its original, but also appeals to people who have never encountered it before.

I have read Jane Austen's novel in its entirety only once, but I have seen multiple film adaptations of it. Every time I see, hear, of read the story, I become more enamored of it. This latest film has its faults, certainly. There are some moments where the film captures a moment from the book, but does it in its own way, where it probably would have been better to simply play the scene as it appears in the book. There is some dialogue, for instance, that feels anachronistic, and would have been improved by taking it from the novel instead of writing a new line to replace one from the original. On the whole, however, the film is excellent. It made me want to go back and read the novel again. I hope that, if you have read Pride and Prejudice, it does the same for you, and if you haven't, I hope it makes you want to read it for the first time.

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