Movie Review: Pride & Prejudice and Oliver Twist: Real/Ideal - Page 3

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.

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.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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