Mansfield Park adaptation.

So we just finished the Masterpiece Theatre showing of the new adaptation of Mansfield Park, and it was enjoyable as a trifle of a movie, but dreadful as an adaptation. I simply could not get past Billie Piper, in the lead role of Fanny Price, as a brunette who dyed her hair blonde in the early 1800s … and then couldn’t be bothered to do her eyebrows!

Mansfield Park is easily my least favorite of Austen’s novels due to its wimpy protagonist, despite all of Fanny’s defender’s claims of her “quiet strength,” which is revisionist bullshit – she’s a damned wimp and even in the one time when she stands up for herself, she’s sorry to have made others around her upset. There’s nice, and then there’s doormat. Fanny Price is a doormat.

The adaptation has turned this somewhat dark novel into a paper-thin romantic intrigue. All of the tension of the novel is gone. Mrs. Norris (yes, like the cat in the Harry Potter series, although here she is a live person) spends the novel tormenting Fanny at every turn; she’s scarcely in the movie at all. In the novel, when Fanny rejects the advances of Henry Crawford, the entire family (she’s staying with her aunt and uncle) turns on her in a relentless attempt to persuade her to accept his proposal, ultimately sending her back to her own poor family as a punishment. Here, she’s not invited on a day trip, and before we know it, Henry has run off with her sister – an event which, by the way, is a total shock in the novel and yet is foreshadowed in the first twenty minutes of the film. And so on. There is no tension in the movie, yet the book is wracked with it. At worst, couldn’t the screenwriters have found some middle ground.

I’m not the only Janeite who thinks so, for what it’s worth – the second of those links focuses on yet more unladylike behavior, as we saw in the new take on Persuasion. I admit that it’s a hard novel to adapt because a faithful version would be oppressive and bleak, but let’s at least stay true to the time period.

The Complete Jane Austen series is continuing with the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice shown in three parts, starting this Sunday; it is well worth watching in its own right, but also stands as perhaps the supreme literary adaptation, period. The series then breaks, resuming on March 23rd with another old edition, this time of Emma, starring Kate Beckinsale.

Northanger Abbey film.

Now that’s more like it. The new movie version of Austen’s Northanger Abbey was spot-on, very faithful to the original novel with some excellent performances.

The plot of the novel, well preserved in the movie, is the simplest of Austen’s canon. Catherine Mansfield is a teenaged girl living in an English country village who loves to read the Gothic romances popular at the time, and who uses those novels as a substitute for the life experience she lacks. A wealthy couple offers to bring her to Bath with them for a few months, where she meets two suitors, Mr. Tilney and Mr. Thorpe, and becomes fast friends with Mr. Thorpe’s sister, Isabella, who is in love with Catherine’s brother James. One of her suitors is good, and one is bad. There’s a misunderstanding over her relationship with the wealthy couple. And that’s almost all of it. It’s a trifle compared to the character studies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but it’s witty and sweet.

This adaptation – I only know of one other, which I haven’t seen – hews quite closely to the plot of the novel, keeping the characters all true to Austen’s writing. Felicity Jones is excellent as Catherine and it doesn’t hurt that she looks like a cuter version of Natalie Portman. Carey Mulligan – also pretty darn cute, and someone had fun with her in wardrobe – was superb as the superficial and often condescending Isabella. And unlike last week’s version of Persuasion, this film allows its scenes to develop rather than rushing us from one spot to the next to try to cram the book into 90 minutes of air time.

Next up: A new take on Mansfield Park, my least favorite Austen novel, due in no small part to its priggish heroine, Fanny Price. There was a 1999 film version starring the underrated Frances O’Connor as Fanny, and while it was a good movie, it was only loosely based on the novel, incorporating some elements from Austen’s own life (using her letters as a basis) and also just flat-out changing some things around. This upcoming version is reported to be more faithful to the text – the screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay for the new Northanger Abbey version and the screenplay for the definitive 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries – which strikes me as a mixed blessing.

More Jane.

I didn’t mean for this to become the all-Jane Austen blog, but I stumbled on this AP article on Andrew Davies, the screenwriter behind the famed 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation and behind this Sunday’s new take on Northanger Abbey. For a guy who talks about making changes to novel texts in his adaptations, he’s all the way at the “faithful” end of the continuum of adapters.