A few minor objections: in the early scenes Kitty and Lydia are so antically in character I was wishing for a giant flyswatter. Knightley also has a tendency to lift her upper lip and wrinkle her nose in a way that is just too cute. She overcomes this bad habit, whereas Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennett seems to have nothing left as an actor but the habit itself. He's not a joke (as he was when "choking back tears" in a BBC interview, in which he compared NBC's editing of Kanye West's comment about President Bush during a Hurricane Katrina relief telethon to book-burning in Nazi Germany), but he is unpardonably boring. Judi Dench as Lady Catherine makes that great comic Gorgon steely and flat without making her funny. I had no idea what kind of high drama Dench thought she was reaching for. And Wright goes in for a few "arty" touches that he doesn't have the moviemaking flair for--when, for instance, the other dancers in a ballroom disappear leaving an angry Elizabeth and a bewildered Darcy dancing alone.

More significantly, the movie almost helplessly emphasizes personality over Austen's more encompassing vision of the harmonic utility of the social arrangements she depicts. She's not a snob but she believes that a hierarchical, landed society provides the most, and deepest, contentment for the most people. If a movie doesn't get this out of Austen then it's cruising below the highest attainable altitude. It was this aspect of Emma that walloped me in Ralph Rader's 18th-century novel class at UC Berkeley; after his last lecture I had to run to a phone and tell somebody about it. (My most concerted attempt to live up to Rader's teaching can be found toward the end of my chapter about Clueless (1995), Amy Heckerling's spectacularly pleasurable modernization of Emma, in my new book.) I don't think Wright's Pride & Prejudice can widen your opinion of Austen, as Rader's lectures did mine. The worst I can say on this basis, however, is merely that the movie isn't everything it possibly could have been, given its source. All the same, this Pride & Prejudice has an enormously satisfying emotional payoff on the personal level, which is almost beyond hoping for at the movies.

This 31 July 2005 Times Online article includes interesting information about what Wright and Moggach felt they were doing with the movie. Wright, for example, says he was stunned to discover that Austen was "one of the first British realists," and keyed the movie to this "discovery." When I repeated this to Maria DiBattista, my thesis advisor, she looked at me blankly and said, "What other possibility is there?" Wright's self-confessed ignorance of literary history is thus doubly shocking, considering how insightfully he has brought Austen to the screen.