Pride and Prejudice

We watched the 2005 Hollywood version of Pride and Prejudice last night as part of our ongoing Jane Austen obsession. It's visually very impressive, and I like the Bennett estate as a working farm. Good pigs. Good cattle. Good hens. Excellent geese. But it skims over the surface of the novel. I did like Donald Sutherland, and I liked a Mrs. Bennett who didn't shriek all the time. No question in my mind, however, that the BBC TV series is much better. I suppose we will have to see the famous Lawrence Olivier version now.

Patrick found an essay on the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie. The author makes a good defense of it, but agrees that it is more a movie experience than a Jane Austen experience. I thought a lot of it was lovely -- and gritty and Hogarthian. The essayist says it works visually to a considerable extent. You are given information through images, rather than dialogue. We bought it at a large discount at Target, so will be able to watch it again.

Austen, I suspect from her writing, was not especially visual. It's her dialogue and her narrative voice that I notice and remember.

I woke this morning thinking it was not a good movie. Emma Thompson wanted her name off the script, and this was a wise decision. The script is not good, except when it uses Austen's lines. I think it's a serious mismatch. A director who thinks visually and an author who thinks in words not images. The script writer should have been a bridge. But it's not a good script...