When admirers of literary classics speak it is a commonplace, even a cliché, of their rhetoric for them to speak of such vast and widespread love existing for them (across generations, across the world, etc.) that listening to them one may imagine that their own admiration is the "normal," universal sentiment of every thinking and feeling human being--which, of course, is not usually the case.
For my part I do not think those admirers deliberately offering "mere" rhetoric. Rather I think it an occasion on which the Frasier Cranes of the world show themselves utterly oblivious to the actual tastes and opinions and knowledge of the vast public, contact with which tends to be a rude shock, no matter how many times it happens. Indeed, those who remember Frasier Crane's first television show may recall how in electing to read to his friends at Cheers Charles Dickens' classic A Tale of Two Cities he found himself obliged to take certain "liberties" with the tale in order to hold their interest (such that the finale recalls David Morell much more than it does Dickens).
So does it go with the work of one of these literary greats of the past whose "cult" is supposed to be vast in that way, Jane Austen--a pretense given away by the reality of the adaptations of her work that we get, with the comparatively successful (commercially, at any rate) 2005 Pride & Prejudice exemplary. A piece of "high concept" Jane Austen befitting its marketing as "From the people who brought you Bridget Jones Diary (!)" it had the actress who had just become a global superstar because of Pirates of the Caribbean in the lead (NOT a complaint, just pointing out), emphasized the romance between the two leads over the broader "comedy of manners" Austen offered in a fashion consistent with the elevator pitch mentality, and was consistently far more striking in its deployment of the camera to present us with striking images than tell the story in that pictures-trump-narrative way, down to the particular choices of image with which they presented the viewer. (Many of the landscapes, the interiors, are beautiful paintings and arresting as such, while the much-criticized "mud and pigs" so characteristic of the scenes shot at the Bennets' home forming a contrast with it in exactly that manner of juxtaposing lush, lifestyle fantasy-inspiring scenes of luxury with grittier imagery Justin Wyatt explained in his book as central to the high concept approach.)
The makers of the movie were also not at all squeamish about sacrificing even plot points bearing importantly on "the romance" itself to make their tale more pleasing to the public. Thus does it go, for example, in the treatment of the Bennet family's behavior at the Netherfield Ball, where almost every member of the family disgraces themselves--all while Mr. D'Arcy is present, and because of their "unsuitable" behavior advises his friend Mr. Bingley against marrying Jane Bennet (producing a crisis for Jane, and a significant obstacle to the development of Elizbaeth's relationship with D'Arcy). Reading the scene in the book we get a sense of Elizabeth Bennet's claustrophobic horror as everywhere she looks there is a sibling or parent making some scene right in front of D'Arcy. ("Elizabeth blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation. She could not regard her mother, or her sisters, without pain. Mr. Darcy was silent, but she could not help feeling that he was observing them with critical attention.") In the movie we still get to see the lot disgracing themselves, but the camera roams all over it in a spirit of "What an amusing spectacle!"--all as Elizabeth, far too busy ducking Mr. Collins to notice, or worry about, what her immediate family is doing, is part of the spectacle herself.
I thought the filmmakers' opting for this sort of comedy over the not uncomedic (but far more narratively important, dramatic tension-raising) original a very poor trade indeed given what was to come later, but in its way the handling of another incident of the story seems still more significant, and telling, namely the crisis caused for the family by Lydia Bennet's running off with Wickham. In my paperback edition of the book this goes on for about fifty pages--fifteen percent or so of the not terribly short narrative, the equivalent of about twenty minutes of screen time in a movie of the length of the 2005 version. Here it passes so quickly, and in such a music video way, that it almost seems a background detail--all as I wouldn't be surprised to find that many scarcely noticed it.
One can chalk this up to the desire to keep the focus of the audience on the Elizabeth-D'Arcy romance, and the tone light--and the pace brisk. Twenty minutes of the Bennets agonizing over the worst decision of Lydia's life would not have been consistent with that--even though this, again, means slighting what D'Arcy's having gone to the trouble and expense of personally resolving the crisis meant for the Bennets, and for Elizabeth, and for their relationship, the ability to appreciate which is worth some remark here. Simply put, much as people today speak of "family values" they have little clue as to just how much the family, not the individual, was the fundamental social unit in pre-modern, even into early modern, times, certainly for the "respectable" classes of which the Bennets were a part (however marginally)--all as the magnitude of the disaster of a Lydia running off in that manner is not something they understand, or for that matter even want to understand, while the filmmakers were certainly not going to challenge the audience by trying to get them to understand the very different (and for modern people, far less attractive) social world they are looking at, which would also have meant compromising the imagery-first approach that prevailed through the film. (Pictures can be worth a thousand words, but sometimes you can say in ten words what you can't say with a good many pictures.) Such is the filming of a "comedy of manners" for a general audience in an age in which even the word "manners" has lost its old meaning--the comprehension of a whole culture in the term reduced to a synonym for "etiquette," such that for the untutored today the term "comedy of manners" probably conjures up something quite different indeed.
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