PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Jane Austen's self-possessing sense of humor is finally getting the much wider audience it has long deserved, thanks to the 1995 British miniseries PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and the Emma Thompson SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. Austen, who died in 1817 at 42 after a long illness and who was never "popular" as a novelist while alive, probably had to suffer the misfortune of waiting until the 20th Century to get full recognition because, in her most well known works, P & P being the most famous, she was trenchant observer of behavior. In spite of and probably impelled by a lifetime limited to living with her family, which included seven brothers and sisters, and being educated at home and travelling little, Austen offered her maiden energy to unnerving, unaccustomed distaff insights which had to sting the real people on whom her characters were based. One can only imagine, for example, the horror the actual personage(s) that Lady Catherine de Berg represents must have endured over Austen's devastating profile. And no less than Austen's own mother might have become "vexed" by the portrait of the exasperating Mrs. Bennet. Through her characters, Austen rarely hesitated to cast initial judgment on others -- hence the original title of P & P: the ironic "First Impressions." Understanding the human inclination to do so, perceiving faults and weaknesses, she conjured embarrassing social ordeal as means to rectify them. She did in the early 1800s what Dickens would later do, but she did it without any exhibitions of violence, menace, corruption. Moralist she was, thanks in large part to her father being a rector (and her mother was a daughter of one), but unlike Dickens, no heavy social critic: her stories don't indict society, only the scoundrels in it. Austen's a comic disciplinarian of manner, custom, propriety. Directed by Simon Langton, and adapted by Andrew Davies, this latest PRIDE AND PREJUDICE most likely sparks so responsive a cord in the audience -- in England, 40% of all televisions were tuned in to the final chapter; and A & E's airing of the series garnered the network its highest ratings -- because there's a strong longing for civility and beauty of language. As we feel our own society dive into hatred, watch as our culture sinks into an "it sucks" cesspool, viewing the cultivated banter between Colin Firth's Darcy and Jennifer Ehle's Lizzie Bennet is like an oasis of rejuvenation. It isn't that we accept the virginal nonsense of love even before a kiss, it's the restoration of politeness: Darcy and Lizzie raging at each other is the art of temperance. It's in the richness of the way words have been designed to inflict wounds and self-righteous opinion, impart wisdom, to reverberate with humor, compassion and passion itself.
After his simpy Vicomte in Milos Forman's VALMONT, after his repressed, prissy invert-turned-fascist in the sickie APARTMENT ZERO, who could have guessed Firth an appropriate Darcy? Looking taller than usual, employing an aristocratic butch gait (the Napoleonic coats and top hats help), having gained some fleshiness in the face, which is covered with soft, short nongreasy curls, he brings a bit of Laurence Olivier's Darcy to the brooding, snob-loner -- perhaps as tribute -- but he's no clone: this is Firth's first real masculine romantic, and not too far removed from the monde of Beau Brummell. Photographed to take advantage of the seemingly endless silence he and Lizzie indulge in, Firth's also very fortunate that he isn't agonizing over Greer Garson, as Olivier did. (Pauline Kael on Garson: "A viewer can get weary watching that eyebrow that goes up and down like the gold curtain at the old Met.") A puffy Barbara Parkins crossed with Mary McDonnell, Jennifer Ehle's Lizzie, the second oldest of five Bennet daughters, has a curiously courteous objurgation that both attracts and repels: the attention she gets for her various sentiments, notions and social position (which is always in danger of ebbing) are also the sins used against her by the upper class bitches -- Lady de Berg, Bingley's sister (in hilarious get ups). Excepting EMMA and MANSFIELD PARK Austen supposedly never wrote characters of deep intellectual persuasion, yet Ehle gives Lizzie the kind of searing smarts that keeps enemies at bay. Ehle has wonderful moments of self-recognition about her early, faulty views, and only the audience shares in the most revealing: when she takes in Darcy's mansion. You can "see" her envisioning herself as the Mistress of Pemberly. The patriarch of the Bennets is warmly played by Benjamin Whitrow, who's never above calling three of his five "the silliest of girls"; the youngest silly Lydia, who almost causes a fatal social calamity, gets the Tracey Ullman treatment by Julia Sawalha; and Barbara Leigh-Hunt's Lady Catherine is another hybrid: Margaret Hamilton as Pamela Brown.
The first two hours of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE are just about the funniest pre-Victorian sitcom I've ever seen. That's compliment, not put-down: director Langton faithfully brings all of Austen's liveliness to what is a very restricted situation: five brides in search of five moneyed dandies. The next two hours remain frothy as they get into the requisite "deepening" of character motivations. (And into Lizzie's realization of what it would mean materially not to be Darcy's wife.) The final two wrap it up with more satisfaction than we might have thought possible, since we know from the beginning that opposites attract and swooning romanticism will triumph. Yes, indeed, it's all rather like the Bard's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, only here readers and viewers get the good dose of Anglo-Saxon uprightness as bonus. Austen's lack of success as a novelist during her living years doesn't mean she wasn't appreciated: Sir Walter Scott was a great champion who admitted that he didn't have the ability to create Austen's perfectly drawn characterizations. But she had detractors, the most famous being Mark Twain, who could not abide her love, if not establishment, of debutante romanticism. Sadly, Austen was never to know how she would so vex the frauds. Maybe that's the key to her popularity today: she's the undisputed queen of genteel vexers. She could be to the besieged Princess Di a mentor in waiting.
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