Elizabeth has brains and wit to spare; the problem is that she needs to spare a measure of the wit, and she's too young and inexperienced--and self-willed--to know how much and when. As her friend Charlotte says to her at the first ball, when Elizabeth falls in love her tongue is going to get her in trouble. As we then see, she falls into a trap precisely because she's so damned clever. It is not the case that Elizabeth, lacking proper guidance at home, happens to err in taking Wickham's part against Darcy, but that her overreliance on wit makes her likely to make such a mistake--to judge a man's character by how pleasing his manners are.

Thus, although "prejudice" is Elizabeth's error with respect to the slander against Darcy, it isn't her underlying flaw, which is a superficial habit of mind, a mind that follows her tongue. Elizabeth's mind is so self-governing that she borders on being morally light, a tendency that must be corrected by experience; the lesson is driven home by the near loss of Mr. Darcy's regard once she has come to realize its true worth. (As Elizabeth says to herself in the novel after reading Darcy's letter about Wickham, "I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either [of the men] were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.") At least she's amenable to correction, and the more impressive in that she herself has to apply it in the absence of appropriate parental authority. Elizabeth is her own governess, for better and worse, and then for much better.

To give us so much of Austen's Elizabeth, Wright and Moggach reduce Mr. Darcy to a supporting character. It's less of a loss than the reverse would be; Darcy's side of the allegory--that pride in rank is a flaw--is easier to demonstrate (certainly to modern audiences). Matthew MacFadyen is very good as Darcy, hemmed in without being unattractive, strong and generous entirely within the terms appropriate to his station. In Austen's eyes, a Mr. Darcy provides foundational strength for the whole community. Wright respects this as Austen's vision, but by lessening Mr. Darcy's importance to the movie he also makes the more appetizing choice to modern female moviegoers of building up the heroine. This doesn't eliminate the social views we no longer live by, or would care to. (This is not a work of shallow nostalgia.) And the movie preserves the contradiction right at the heart of the book: as a reward for growing up, the middle-class heroine deserves no less than the man of the greatest consequence and largest income in the book. But that's the full extent of Austen's romantic fantasy, which comes couched entirely in social and psychological naturalism.

The shift of weight almost entirely onto Elizabeth also shifts the movie onto Keira Knightley's slender shoulders. For me, the biggest surprise of all was her performance: she carries the movie with her reed-like uprightness and poise. It's a surprise because she had struck me as downright amateurish in Bend It Like Beckham (2002). But though she's as doe-eyed as Winona Ryder, she has a dramatic intelligence and an astuteness with dialogue that no American actress her age (20) can match. Knightley makes the qualities of Elizabeth's mind visible to the naked eye: her interest in, and amusement at, what's going on around her well up and gather in her luminous face. But there's more than a vivid-minded comeliness here: Elizabeth is as articulate, and nearly as contentious, a heroine as Shakespeare's Beatrice, and Knightley is as well-suited for the role as any actress believably just entering the marriage market. And not only does Knightley have the delivery necessary for the high comedy, she also displays the sense of awe necessary to mime what it means to realize you are not as worthy of the thing you want as you have always assumed.