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Favorite Miniseries
Pride and Prejudice
My favorite of the Jane Austen movies was Persuasion, because it was the most faithful to Austen's time and to her story — though I enjoyed all the others (including Clueless ). However, with Pride and Prejudice we got a chance to see how much is lost when these novels are compressed into a two-hour format. I love Austen's novels and, when I write contemporary fiction, I always feel her looking over my shoulder, demanding that I be ruthlessly honest with my characters, loving them but exposing their flaws for everybody to see. So I always approach an Austen-based movie with both dread and excitement. The dread is that the filmmakers will either misunderstand the story (cf. Emma ) or will over-sanitize it for a modern audience (cf. the Olivier Pride and Prejudice ). But with this gorgeous production no such thing happened. While it didn't have the ruthlessly realistic lighting and lack of makeup that made Persuasion so effective but non-mainstream, it did create the society and the characters with great subtlety.
One great relief, for me at least, was that this version did not sanitize the aunt. I always hated that about the Olivier P&P because it so thoroughly undoes the point of the movie, which is that these two people are overcoming society at its stupidest in order to transcend social barriers arising from money and family. For the aunt to be complicit in their marriage, as the Olivier version had it, makes their story into Rostand's The Romantics, which has its place, I suppose. In this miniseries, however, the aunt is kept as tyrannical and blind as Austen wrote her, and it works better for the story.
In this version we are able to see the father as a self-loathing weakling hiding behind a caustic tongue — we can admire his honesty while recognizing that he could have and should have gone a step further and acted on his superior understanding of the people around him. In other words, we see the character that Austen wrote. Nor is the mother shown as a harmless biddy — she really is a shockingly bad-mannered, self-indulgent whiner who adores most the child who deserves it least. And yet ... through her one can see that society has not changed, that loathsome people still function within it, despised by some but still able to spread poison wherever they go. (We forget how shocking it was for the main character's own parents to be so brutally portrayed in fiction of that time: a generation later, when Charles Dickens wanted children to be badly treated he had to kill off their parents or at least kick the child out of the home, for fathers were stern-but-just and mothers were saintly.)
The actor who played Darcy also showed up in The English Patient as the cuckolded husband, and there as here his performance was low-key but very affecting and honest — more so than the leads in that movie.
It's available on tape and is best viewed in one long marathon. I expect to watch it every year for a long time to come.
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