Movie Review: Pride & Prejudice and Oliver Twist: Real/Ideal - Page 4

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.

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.

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 …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog