reviewing pride & prejudice

I find myself coming back to this story quite a bit, it seems. While I like it a lot, I'm still surprised. I decided, though, after my earlier comments on the various screen versions, to re-read the book. It had been several years since my last perusal, and I had only read it once before.

Unsurprisingly, since I rarely remember too many details of a book on first viewing, it almost felt like a first reading. Since I had so recently re-watched the mini-series, though, it made for an interesting amount of immediate comparison.

I remember when the Keira Knightley P&P movie came out, how people were enthusing about how great the book is, and hearing Austen's name spoken in the same sentence with Shakespeare. While I was rather pleased to hear that at the time, I can't say as I gave it a whole lot of thought. After re-reading P&P, though, I have to say that that's significantly overblown.

It's a fantastic book, and I enjoyed it a great deal (especially the last several chapters, which kept me, literally, laughing out loud). However, it is certainly not without its flaws. The most significant of these was a strong tendency to summarize conversations, without giving them verbatim. I'll admit, this can be very difficult to do, but it does add a great deal. That is, the reader can see the speaker's personality, without requiring the author to explicitly tell them what that personality is. As the saying goes, "Show it, don't tell it." The mini-series, in fact, actually improved on the original, in this respect, as that necessitated spelling out many of the exchanges. It also required moving some phrases from words from the author to actual dialogue, which is to the good.

Another thing that significantly separates her (and, so far as I'm aware, everyone else) from Shakespeare was his extraordinary inventiveness with language. I read once that he created 1700 words and phrases that have become common koine. I can't personally vouch for the number, but that there were a lot of them is incontestable.

(As a side note, this is actually why I think the Oxfordians are full of it, in attributing Shakespeare's works to the Earl of Oxford. A better educated person would be less likely to be so creative in phrase, as they would likely have a larger lexicon from which to work. For what it's worth, I do think it quite likely, though, that the actors with whom Shakespeare worked probably contributed materially to the finished product.)

In any event, getting back to the original comparison, Ms Austen, while occasionally showing great turns of phrase (her dialog varies between quite good and outstanding), does not even approach the Bard, in that respect.

Getting back to the story itself, it is also interesting to compare life in that time period. Though the story is confined to the rich (even the Bennets, described as being less than rich, can hardly be seen to be so, having live-in servants and such), it is easy to see many things that are possible now, even for the very poor, that were not possible for them. And the social engagements are difficult to comprehend, for me. Sitting around, waiting for the mail is just unimaginable in this day of phone and email. And the amount of chaperonage; ridiculous!

I suppose I might change my mind about the necessity when my daughter is a bit older, but that amount of supervision would have driven me quickly nuts. How does one actually grow up, in such an environment. One can see how that might lead to the "nanny state" in which the UK currently finds itself. What is harder to understand is how the Brits would have accomplished so much in the meanwhile. Yes, yes, I can hear someone with a thick brogue saying, "With Scottish leadership". Be that as it may, it's an odd set of circumstances.

other versions

I obliquely promised to talk about the other versions of Pride & Prejudice in my last post. Warning: this will have spoilers.

Starting with the Olivier release, there were a couple of interesting points. One thing I found interesting, from an historical perspective, was how short the credits are. Yes, typical for the time, but that was the first movie I watched where that really caught my notice. Compare the three or four screen-fuls of credits to the crawls on modern movies that go on long enough to play two complete songs. Also note that, IIRC (I haven't watched this version in a number of years), all of the credits were at the beginning.

Anyway, I mentioned a major story change. Very near the end of the story (chapter fifty-six of the book, out of sixty-one), lady Catherine de Bourgh drops in, unannounced, on the Bennets. Her goal was to talk to Elizabeth, and have confirmed that Elizabeth wasn't, and wouldn't be, engaged to Mr Darcy. In the original, Elizabeth affirmed the first, denied the second, and lady Catherine left in a huff, after heavily insulting Miss Bennet and family.

In this version, lady Catherine was amused, and affirmed that Miss Bennet would be a good match for Mr Darcy. I believe, in fact, that he was in the cart with lady Catherine, and proposed forthwith.

As I alluded, a pretty major change, but one that worked quite well, and made lady Catherine much more human. So I still rather like the change.

To keep in chronological order, another "version" of the story (sort of) was in Bridget Jones' Diary. Well, ok, this was a modern take, and the liberties taken are huge. Still, a very entertaining movie, if at times silly.

I can't say as much for the sequel. Thank goodness I saw this on DVD, rather than in the theater. The best part of it was the bonus feature that had Rene Zellweger, in character as Bridget Jones, interviewing Colin Firth (as Colin Firth). That was hilarious; the movie itself was pretty lame, unfortunately.

Next up was Chadha's modern Bollywood take, Bride & Prejudice. I generally enjoy Bollywood's extremely over-the-top style, and Aishwarya Rai is a nice addition to nearly any movie. And making it a musical is rarely a bad thing, IMHO. Lots of fun.

Wright's version, the year after, was a huge disappointment for me. I'm generally a fan of Keira Knightley (I thought she was great in Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham, and did as much as possible in Love, Actually and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy), but I can't for the life of me understand how she got an Oscar nomination for P&P. I had a long rant I wrote about this right after I first saw the movie, but now I can't find it. The only part I can remember is complaining about her having a smirk on her face after delivering devastating lines. It just really didn't work.

Update: I found the rant to which I referred. It actually wasn't nearly as long as I remembered. And the complaint about the smirks was the only part that referred to Ms Knightley. The other things that bothered me were the near removal of the father (my favorite character), and the mother's character being vastly changed by two scenes (unfortunately, I didn't note what the incidents were, nor do I remember) to make her less annoying, as well as the inevitable compression of the story.

In fact, the only good thing I can remember about the movie was that the original of my favorite statue from the Louvre showed up in the background at Pemberley. That statue is Dirce:

A short movie review (of sorts)

Sort of. I've long been a fan of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I first encountered it a decade or so back, catching most of the 1940 Olivier movie on cable. I later discovered that that version made some major changes to the storyline, but it was still a very satisfying telling. In fact, I sometimes debate whether the biggest change there was a good one; certainly, it made one of the major characters must less of an ogre (that would be lady Catherine de Bourgh, for those keeping score at home).

Still, it was not until I encountered the BBC's mini-series retelling, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, that I fully came to appreciate the story. The several additional hours of depth to the story certainly added a great deal. As does, my wife tells me, the scene of Colin Firth bathing. I've since read the book a couple of times, and seen a couple of newer versions ("Bride and Prejudice" is excellent, the Keira Knightley "Pride & Prejudice" not so much. More commentary on one or both of those, later), but none come close to matching this one for the quality of acting and faithfulness to the story.

I held off on buying the laserdisc release when it came out, mostly because it was so expensive, but when it was released on DVD, I got it almost immediately. And when a 10th anniversary edition came out, I didn't mind getting that one as well. I had second thoughts about getting the Blu-ray release that came out recently, but decided that I might as well, since it wasn't too expensive.

I wasn't really expecting a big change in quality, especially given the type of story; you don't expect the additional resolution to make that big of a difference in a character-driven tale. However, they were able to remaster it from the original negatives (according to a bonus video, this wasn't possible until some time last year because of frame misalignments around editing splices. Previous cuts were created from prints), which resulted in noticeably greater detail and much greater color fidelity. Really, the difference in colors was enough to make me feel like I was seeing it for the first time again.

What was very odd, to me, was that the greatest change wasn't in the distant, panorama shots. I expected that those would be where almost all of the improvement was. However, there was almost no improvement there; something in the process brought out a stippling in those shots that cancelled out whatever improvement would have been there. But the foreground (and close background) material? Oh, that was amazing. Seeing clearly through windows, seeing the edges of flames in torches and fireplaces, making out the jewelry that people wore? The detail, combined with the added color depth, was truly astounding.

So if you like the story, and are wondering whether it is worth buying in Blu, the answer is resoundingly yes.

As a side note, though, I do wonder about why remastering via negative wasn't feasible previously. The misalignment issue seems like a fairly trivial one, if you've already got something for scanning the film; just overscan by a significant amount, and remove the extra crap (and rotate, one would presume). I'm sure there's something there I'm missing, but I have no idea what.