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pride and prejudice, 26/9/05
Reviews

From:
Category: Films
Date: 26 September 2005

Review

they actually gave it quite a good shot.. the main problem is that you must be prepared to ignore certain speeches which have been rather cringe worthily changed or added on, and resist the urge to shout 'he doesn't really say that!' at the cinema screen.

The worst of these are charlotte's weepy 'Don’t you dare judge me Lizzy!' (about marrying Mr. Collins... as if anybody would have been that over emotional and un reserved in the Jane Austen days!) Also Darcy's letter, which merely skims over his sister's elopement whilst botching up the details in an attempt to shorten it and make it more digestible; or worse still, the particularly gooey extra few lines in his proposal speech: 'You have bewitched me body and soul, and I do not want us to part from this day forth'..... Oh how I squirmed in my seat! The difference between Austen’s words and the modern extensions is, like, heuuuge...

This last speech does also happen on the early morning moors, with Lizzy and Mr. Darcy both in their pyjamas after neither can sleep, far too much passion to take at all seriously me thinks, though we may have found a successor to Collin Firth in his wet shirt as Matthew Macfadyen strides across the misty morning Hertfordshire moors, his riding coat billowing behind him..... dead sexy.

The balls are brilliant, the locations really quite good, the comic scenes timed beautifully and the sisters are actually believably young girls, rather than the usual late twenties. Sutherland does a good job as Mr. Bennet, (of course... ) he's a bit old for the part, but I liked that he actually seemed to have some kind of relationship with his wife, who is still wonderfully cringe worthy but less a caricature of herself than in the TV series. And though we know and love her far too much by now for her Catherine De-Bourgh (spelling?) to be suitably appalling, Judy Dench is really good too, (of course...) Shame about the story being condensed into only a couple of hours, (we never really get to hate Mr. Wickham) certain subtleties of the plot being SPELLED OUT, and unnecessary close up shots of troubled faces, but as much is to be expected from any modern day romance, I guess.

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