In the popular imagination, there have been countless film adaptations of that all-time classic Pride and Prejudice. Yet this is far from the truth. The 1995 BBC series, featuring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, was so dominant, so universally adored, it has lingered in the public consciousness as a cinematic standard. But this year’s Pride & Prejudice, released in September, is actually the first serious film version for 65 years — only the famed, but oddly flawed, black-and-white 1940 adaptation, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, preceded it.
Jane Austen, like Dickens, is slotted automatically into a clichéd visual groove. The traditional Austen adaptation is Regency-lite: a painterly tableau of empire-line dresses, sotto voce ballroom chatter, squeals and high-ceilinged elegance. The great directorial challenge is to surpass the conventions of the chamber piece — often literally — by taking the action outside. But Austen was a novelist for whom the Napoleonic wars were merely glimpsed through the drawing- room window, whose female protagonists were bound by convention to follow highly formalised codes of behaviour, so the text itself dictates many of its own constraints.
As with contemporary biographers who feel obliged to conjure up a surprise approach to a tried-and-tested subject, there is pressure on film-makers to fashion difference for its own sake. Working Title’s Pride & Prejudice combines that mandatory quest for originality with a genuine desire to take a fresh look at a period that has been subject to chocolate-box inanities like no other. The tale of five sisters who face penury unless their mother can marry them off is so iconic that bringing it to the screen at all is daring.
The first advantage lies in the leftfield choice of director. Joe Wright is a 33-year-old with a background in social-realist television drama such as the gritty-but-moving Bob & Rose, and the Bafta-winning mini-series Charles II, which was shot partly in documentary style. Wright claims to have approached the project having neither read Pride and Prejudice, nor seen a screen version of Austen other than Sense & Sensibility. Having since acquainted himself with the oeuvre, he calls Austen “one of the first British realists” — a searing social commentator working at a time of romanticism and gothic artifice. Wright was never likely to adhere to the traditional costume-drama route of luvvie performances and mindless dancing.
“I read the script in the pub one afternoon, and I wept bitterly,” he says. “So then I went and read the novel, and I was really shocked by it, because it exploded all my preconceptions of what Austen was. I had imagined it all to be in the picturesque tradition of the painting of that time, yet here was someone who was writing very acute character observation. So, in a sense, she seemed to me to be a realist more than anything else. I’m a huge fan of British realism, and I think it’s probably one of the best things that we’ve done, in terms of cinema, especially. So I decided that that was the tack to take. Since then, I’ve watched the adaptations, and I think that people have looked at the painting of the period and tried to reproduce that cinematically. What we tried to do was completely ignore the painting. We tried to get an aesthetic sense from the writing.”
Wright’s Pride & Prejudice is truly Austen with a difference — but not the kind of difference that will scare the horses. Catering to market demands, Elizabeth Bennet is played by Keira Knightley, who, despite her Austen-esque surname, is no natural Austen heroine. Striding about playing what is probably the juiciest female role in English literature, she is still redolent of a skinny London schoolgirl, all contemporary vernacular and aesthetic.
The Vogue-model presence of Knightley aside, this is an undeniably grittier, more socially profound and simply more human version of Austen. The one exception in the history of Austen adaptations that is frequently cited by the team behind Pride & Prejudice is Roger Michell’s 1995 BBC drama, Persuasion, a contemplatively moody take on an intrinsically darker work.
With characteristic audacity, Wright yanked the setting of Pride & Prejudice backwards by more than a decade to 1797. Jane Austen wrote an earlier, rejected version of the novel, then entitled First Impressions, when she was 21; the version as we know it was published in 1813.
“I thought that the earlier age was more interesting; the world was more in a state of flux. And also, on a purely aesthetic level, I hate empire-line dresses — I think people look like balloons in them,” says Wright. “There’s a lot of post-rationalisation in it. Some ideas come through research, and some ideas are justified through research.”
“This is the muddy-hem version,” says Deborah Moggach, the screenwriter. “This isn’t just a frothy comedy. I think the comedy comes out of real pain and turmoil, and then, of course, it’s funnier. I wanted to be truthful to the core of the book.” Here, the thin-frocked Bennets have to clamber past chickens and livestock to enter an unmanicured Georgian landscape, its shafts of sun thick with feathers and flies. A pig crashes through the kitchen, sizeable testicles on display; the mess of a family of seven clutters surfaces as a giggling gaggle of plain teenage girls squabble beside smeared windows; and a truly surly Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) watches the locals sweat, shout and spill drinks as they stomp and trip their way through the commotion of an Assembly Rooms dance that couldn’t be more removed from the customary Regency bowing and simpering.
But how does a big-budget, star-studded movie tread the middle ground between the stains and shadows of art-house realism and our requirement for a well-loved romance to look easy on the eye? “I always said I wanted it to be beautiful, but not pretty,” says Wright. “One’s natural inclination as an artist is to make things beautiful. I also wanted it to be provincial, and I wanted them to have a laugh.”
The lowing, clucking, hazy beauty of Pride & Prejudice is reminiscent at times of Polanski’s Tess, just as the clamour and dirt are often more characteristic of the cinematic style generally deemed suitable for a rowdy Victorian adaptation, rather than a stiffer Regency period piece. Similarly, the scenery is often more Wuthering Heights than an English Heritage vision of parks, hat shops and soldiers.
Socio-economic realities are not skimmed over: the financial stakes are made clear for a modern audience, and for the first time, the predicament of the matchmaking Mrs Bennet (Brenda Blethyn), a character usually played as a twittering idiot, is comprehensible.
