Thus, Pride and Prejudice can be cut down for the stage and played for high comedy. Wright, however, grounds Austen's work in the tradition of English naturalism that she inherited from Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Fanny Burney, and developed contemporaneously with Walter Scott. First of all, starting at the wider end of the scale, Wright takes deliberate care with the country-life setting. We see in passing the livestock and poultry on all sides and under foot, as well as the working of the land and the keeping of the house. A constant industry surrounds the central action, which takes place in a living countryside. (You are kept aware as subtly as possible that the plot involves possession of the means of survival.) Wright expands the scope of Austen's observation, and he does it without sacrificing theatrical compression. (This is perhaps the most respectable form of commercial genius in the movies.)

On the more intimate end of the scale, Wright directs his actors to be especially alert to the other characters' signals, and he swiftly cuts to the telling details. Austen's society is extremely formal; language is spoken nearly in code and at times the characters have to decipher what's said to them and manage a response in a short enough time to conceal any immoderate reactions they may be having. Decorum is a constant challenge, and you can see here how it keeps the eyes darting for information and the brain whirring for verbal resources. Wright constantly makes us aware that the characters are reading each other, and framing their replies. The glances, and hand gestures, are as pointed and meaningful and yet as understated as in any movie.

Finally, Wright has developed a cumulative technique to get the big picture and the insets all at once. Best of all are the sequences (such as the opening at the Bennets' home and later at two dances) in which the roaming camera, with seemingly unbounded peripheral vision, gives us an unusually rich sense of simultaneity. For the most part Wright's technique couldn't be called flashy, but it revives senses dulled by years of depressingly unimaginative literary projects. This is a knife-sharpener's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

In 127 minutes Wright gets in as much as he grasps of Austen's specificity and compass, rightly assuming that, of the two, specificity is more essential to a novel. He understands perfectly, for instance, what a problem it is for the oldest Bennet girls, Jane and Elizabeth, that their father is weak-willed, their mother too clumsily obvious in parading them before eligible bachelors, and their younger sisters disastrously silly. In Austen the charge that a girl's family poses an impediment to marrying her is valid, and unanswerable--it isn't Elizabeth's fault, but she can't deny it's a source of chagrin, "hopeless of remedy." It is not only snobbery that would make men with great fortunes hesitate to ally themselves with careless parents like the Bennets. Their sensible oldest daughters seem to have educated themselves, and that leads to problems of its own.