Movie Review: Pride & Prejudice and Oliver Twist: Real/Ideal - Page 5

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.

Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist

The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their … social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages.

--Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism

In contrast to Wright's Pride & Prejudice, Roman Polanski's recent adaptation of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist is an example of attention to naturalistic details where they are least to the point. Polanski approaches the book as if it were a novel and it simply isn't, in any but a superficial sense. The extremes of fiendish darkness and seraphic light, the coincidences and miraculous deliverances, the grotesque humor, the realization that the author has worked out an ingenious demonstration of abstract beliefs, all tell you it's a romance. Readers may be misled by the protest against early 19th-century institutions such as the workhouse in the early portions of the book, and by the graphic depiction of the slumscape once the little hero gets to London. The pitfall of a criminal life was real enough for a poor boy, then as now, but Oliver isn't a naturalistic character, described from the inside out, and capable of further development, as Elizabeth Bennet is, or even as Dickens's own Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend are. (Dickens transforms both these men from allegorical vices into plausible young heroes in the course of those books.)

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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