Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.
Mark Twain, on Jane Austen
If you savor English country dances and tittering young ladies, Pride & Prejudice is your film. While watching it tonight, I kept thinking that Keira Knightley is just a little too hot for 18th century England, particularly her gleaming, perfectly aligned teeth. Her love interest, the brooding, tight-lipped Mr. Darcy (played by Matthew MacFadyen), is positioned as a rather stationary running joke, lurking in the background of nearly every scene to cast smoldering glances towards Knightley’s character, Elizabeth.
I’m told he does a lot of smoldering in the book, too, which I haven’t yet read. But having seen most of Austen’s book adaptations and knockoffs via the mighty Merchant Ivory British Drama Machine, I’m well versed in the conventions: the clash of classes and privileges, the lust to marry, the sniveling bachelor pastor with eyes for the heroine, the sage father and worrisome, meddling mother, and The Big Misunderstanding, in which our hero is mistaken for a jerk when in fact he’s a upstanding fellow who also happens to have huge tracts of land. Yet through it all, I couldn’t help but smile contentedly even though I knew what was going to happen; in that respect, the movie’s a success.
There’s a lot to look at in Pride & Prejudice, plenty of gorgeous castle-like country homes with improbably lush landscapes, soft focus sunsets, carefully casual poses copped from the Renaissance masters, ruggedly handsome men on horseback, etc. It dragged towards the end and the sugary closing scene with The Kiss caused some scandal amongst Austenites on both sides of the pond: the U.S. ending makes it clear that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have affirmed their love for a lifetime. However, upon the film’s initial release in the U.K., the ending was edited to make their happy coupling more ambiguous. That dénouement has since been replaced by the U.S. version, causing the British publication Entertainment-Wise to gripe about “the cheesy extra ending that was filmed especially for those cringe loving Yanks.”
Ah, yes, we Yanks enjoy cheese with a good cringe, and while we do, take a look at our gleaming, perfectly aligned teeth.