p&p

ok, so this blog has boldy advertised of its adoration of all things austin (enough a's?.....) and so i offer this insightful review of the latest p&p for your perusal.....knowing full well that none of y'all will appreciate the sentiment more than the mm.......

Pardon my prejudice, but for me, only one Pride will do

By Robin Berkowitz
A&E Editor

A decade ago I providentially acquired the five-hour BBC/A&E Pride and Prejudice on tape, and it became a kind of audio-visual security blanket. Whenever the stresses of modern life threatened to overwhelm me, I would retreat into the world of harpsichords and cotillions, Empire-waist gowns and horse-drawn carriages. Finding me ensconced on the couch watching Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy exchanging barbed witticisms at a ball for the umpteenth time, my spouse perceptively and tolerantly observed, "This is kind of like your very own Prozac prescription, isn't it?"

All this is by way of saying that I feel a certain protectiveness, even a degree of expertise (or at least familiarity) when it comes to P&P.

One literary essayist's oft-quoted characterization of Pride and Prejudice is that not much happens, except that a young man changes his manners and a young lady changes her mind.

So true -- and yet P&P is packed with incident, which is rather the difficulty for filmmakers looking to adapt it. There's a whole checklist of essential milestones that the screenwriter dare not skimp -- dances, dinners, visits, proposals, confrontations -- and a central cast that cannot be dispensed with. Woe betide any scribe who tries to eliminate one of the five Bennet sisters, even though fretful Kitty and sententious Mary do very little to drive the story forward. And let's face it: Mrs. Bennet could be just as worried about marrying off three dowryless daughters as five.

The very latest Pride & Prejudice, with Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen, races through all the narrative high points in an admirably streamlined fashion, which is to its credit, and manages to paint a convincing portrait of early 1800s country life in the bargain. Which makes it all the more remarkable that this version, while correct in all its details, sidelines the real action -- charting those changes the young man and the young lady are undergoing.



Plenty of critics, experts and fans have concurred with Jane Austen's opinion that Elizabeth Bennet is "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." Considering that she made her debut in 1813, she's still pretty hot stuff in 2005.

Unlike, say, poor doormat Fanny Price in Mansfield Park -- who was given a complete personality transplant in 1999 by filmmaker Patricia Rozema -- the sassy, outspoken and lovable Lizzie can leap straight from the page to the screen. With a few cosmetic tweaks, she can become a modern British singleton (Bridget Jones's Diary), or a dazzling Bollywood beauty queen (Bride & Prejudice). There's even a 2003 Pride and Prejudice update for, uh, Latter-day Saints (which cannot be recommended, not because Elizabeth and her friends go to Mormon church services, but because it's unequivocally silly).

Knightley acquits herself well in company that includes Greer Garson and Renee Zellweger, but the onus of embodying Elizabeth (or Bridget, or Lalita) shouldn't rest on the actress' personal charisma; it should reside in the script. Knightley is charming in the new version from director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach (with a rumored assist from Sense and Sensibility's Emma Thompson), but her appeal is Keira's and not Lizzie's.

And that's why Jennifer Ehle, an unknown when she was cast in the 1995 BBC/A&E miniseries, remains the definitive Elizabeth of our time, and perhaps all time. It's because screenwriter Andrew Davies, working from Austen's incomparable template, wrote her that way, along with a Mr. Darcy whose emotions were manifest throughout instead of remaining a mystery until the final denouement. (And that, I contend, is also why Bridget and her contemporaries, both fictional and real-life, swooned over Colin Firth -- not because he's the hunkiest Brit to ever cast a smoldering gaze, but because this was a script that let us girls really see Mr. Darcy yearn and burn.)

In the new millennium, we've had no fewer than four Prides (counting the contemporary variations), after averaging about one a decade since the late 1930s. But here is a truth that should be universally acknowledged: There's only one that's prescription-strength Austen.

Robin Berkowitz can be reached at rberkowitz@sun-sentinel.com.

i especially like the notion that p&p is akin to prozac.......i couldn't have said that better myself.........