Pride & Prejudice (2005)
Directed by Joe Wright
A story of love and life among the landed English gentry during the Georgian era. Mr. Bennet is a gentleman living in Hertfordshire with his overbearing wife and five daughters, but if he dies their house will be inherited by a distant cousin whom they have never met, so the family's future happiness and security is dependent on the daughters making good marriages.
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19 films that influenced Pride & Prejudice
What critics say influenced Pride & Prejudice
The sequence feels like one unbroken shot, and has the same elegance as Visconti's long single take as he follows the prince through the ballrooms in " The Leopard ."
The ball scenes are masterfully handled in the manner of Visconti’s THE LEOPARD, and one sublime moment finds the crowd vanishing as Darcy and Elizabeth discover one another.
Wright's Pride & Prejudice won't satisfy the purists, who will quibble over the details and complain that there's too many "Charlotte Bronte" moments (like the Wuthering Heights homage with Elizabeth staring out over a rocky precipice).
The frequency with which Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been adapted for the screen has been noted in a number of reviews of the most recent version, from first-time director Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley.
The film's single false note comes in a post-wedding scene on a balcony at Pemberley Hall that's unfortunately reminiscent of "Sixteen Candles."
The scene is beyond sappy, not to mention distractingly similar to the ending of Sixteen Candles: Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), newly married, sit facing each other on a table overlooking the grounds of his ancestral home, exchanging sweet nothings, with the camera slowly moving in on them until they kiss.
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As a testament to this, it’s important to point out that Austen’s work has also been used as the basis for many current films I’ve enjoyed, including “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary.”
…fter a deluge of Jane Austen adaptations in the 1990s, including Persuasion, Emma, Sense & Sensibility, and Amy Heckerling's critics' favorite, the boldly funny and iconic Clueless (which preserved the essence of Austen better than those other stiff upper-lipped versions ever did), one might wonder why we need another one midway through a new decade.
Following successful big screen versions of Emma and Sense and Sensibility, we now get Pride & Prejudice.
Pride and Prejudice does move a little slowly, and it isn’t as rich as the 1995 Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility , but it’s been awhile since we’ve had Austen done in such a wonderfully romantic way.
Even the 1990s Jane Austen revival, which gave us Ang Lee’s sublime Sense and Sensibility and Douglas McGrath’s lighthearted Emma , as well as the BBC “Pride and Prejudice” miniseries, produced no cinematic version of Austen’s best-loved novel.
The most youthful-looking adaptation of Jane Austen’s frequently filmed 1813 novel, this lavishly romantic but cleareyed film was directed by newcomer Joe Wright and boasts a screenplay polished by Emma Thompson, Academy Award winner for her 1995 adaptation of Austen’s ”Sense and Sensibility.”
Austen, of course, (screenplay by Deborah Moggach with an uncredited dialogue buff by Emma Thompson, who won an Oscar for adapting Austen's "Sense and Sensibility") will throw many obstacles and misunderstandings the couple's way, including Mr. Wickkham (Rupert Friend), the underhanded officer and former friend of Darcy's who eventually subjects the Bennet family to scandal in his romancing of Lydia Bennet (Jena Malone, "Saved!," "The Ballad of Jack and Rose") and the obsequious and self-important Mr. Collins (Tom Hollander, "The Lawless Heart," "Stage Beauty," in an inspired supporting performance), who believes he's doing Elizabeth a favor by asking for her hand.
Just ten years ago I only lasted through 30 minutes of the BBC's highly acclaimed five hour mini-series on Jane Austen's masterpiece, yet I had found Austen by far the most "tolerable" of the genre and had greatly enjoyed Ang Lee's 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
As seen from this youthful perspective, "Pride and Prejudice" has some of the same surprise that "Romeo and Juliet" does when it's cast properly.
Brenda Blethyn (Saving Grace) is Elizabeth’s mother, and Donald Sutherland is her white-haired, kindly father.
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His film is considerably less starchy than your average Austen adaptation; in fact, the first half of "Pride" features so much dancing it starts to look like the 19th-century answer to "Saturday Night Fever."
Their dad is played by Donald Sutherland, the stoned college prof from “Animal House.”