films

3) AUSTEN FILMS:

For US audiences, I think, part of the thrill of watching these movies is the excitement of education, of thinking "I'm learning something," while having fun. Likewise, when cultural critic Janice Radway interviewed women who read "trashy" romance novels, one of their answers was, "It's educational." They learned something about history and political geography in books about English ladies or French marquises in love. The fact is, these women -- like people going to Jane Austen movies -- really are learning something. Even if history in Sense and Sensibility seems like a glamorous swirl of fashions and romantic vistas, for instance, one still comes away from the movie with a heightened awareness of how people's lives were restricted in the past, not just by gender, but by class and propriety. Integral to understanding the pain of a lost love in this movie is understanding how a gentleman of Jane Austen's period (the early nineteenth century) would have cared more for his class privilege, his money, than he would have about love. Willoughby breaks Marianne's heart because he ultimately cannot marry a woman who isn't rich. This, in itself, is a lesson about the way marriage worked in centuries before our own.
Perhaps the most unexpected lesson of all is that Jane Austen movies teach US audiences that learning can be entertaining. People in the US aren't the boorish idiots many commentators have claimed they are. After having been told for decades that they're the "lowest common denominator," and that their culture is trash, movie goers in the US should be pleased to discover that seeing Jane Austen movies will not get them called any degrading names. Jane Austen movies, unlike slasher or porn flicks, are not a guilty pleasure. Because education is associated with "bettering oneself," we can believe that watching Jane Austen movies will improve us in any number of ways. At the very least, it's certain that few would be ashamed to tell their friends they saw Emma last night. They learned about history, after all, and it was British history to boot.

http://www.eserver.org/bs/annalee.html

3.1) Price and Prejudice:

We can say as much as we want about how valuable it is to learn history from Jane Austen movies, but it's probably true that an historical documentary about England during the Napoleanic Wars wouldn't garner even 2 percent of the audience that the Pride and Prejudice miniseries did on television. What's enjoyable about Pride and Prejudice isn't so much the historical background, but the soap opera of the characters' lives -- who slept with whom, who has an illegitimate baby or a bad reputation, and of course, who wants to get married and for what reasons. Such concerns, many would say, are timeless. Indeed, many scholars would argue that we measure Great Literature by its timelessness, although I doubt they would interpret "timelessness" to mean that Jane Austen's masterpieces would translate well into a contemporary soap opera plot. A nation obsessed with commercials and sitcoms watched Pride and Prejudice, however, for just this reason.
The stuff of soaps -- love, betrayal, secrets, sex, murder, blackmail -- are the "timeless" issues that make literary hits like Shakespeare plays popular in the twentieth century, just as they make bits of Milton's Paradise Lost required reading in high school. Pride and Prejudice has all these issues too, and one might be tempted to say that regular people watch Jane Austen TV because anyone, at any time, can relate to falling in love. But "love," for Jane Austen, is very different than "love" for people living in the nineties. Elizabeth Bennett falls in love because it is proper, because Mr. Darcy is a socially appropriate choice for her, and because if she does not marry it is likely she will lead a socially and materially impoverished life. In short, she has very few other options besides what Austen would call "love," and what we in the nineties might very well call "gold digging."
Rich Mr. Darcy, after all, offers Elizabeth quite a bit more money than she is used to, and her love for him develops over time as she comes to understand how much her family will need that money, given the poor matches her sisters are likely to make. Pride and Prejudice isn't nearly as crass about this as I indicate that it is -- we are invited to understand Elizabeth's growing appreciation of Mr. Darcy as a moral affair. She realizes she's been prejudiced against his character, thinking him cold and unfeeling, when really he's quite the ethical fellow after all. He just has a lot of personal problems which he keeps secret, because secrecy about personal matters is the decent thing.
So here we are, watching all this on TV, waiting until the delicious finale when all Mr. Darcy's secrets will be revealed and he and Elizabeth will get married. Then they'll go live at his sumptuous estate, saving Elizabeth and her family from having to depend upon a rude cousin, who has inherited their property, for a home. How timeless is this scene really? We still fall in love, of course, but at this point it is usually considered morally questionable, if not downright despicable, to let financial concerns determine one's "love." Yet there's only one reason why we care whether or not Elizabeth will learn to get over her distaste for Darcy: an alliance with him would allow her to "marry up" into a higher class than the one she was born in. These are the same values that had critics dubbing the movie Pretty Woman a substanceless, retrograde, sexist fairy tale. Without all the historical window dressing, however, Pride and Prejudice is basically Pretty Woman -- in both, a lower class woman learns to love an upper class man (and vice versa), in spite of their mutual distrust and prejudice. Elizabeth is certainly not as "low class" as a prostitute, but she will be poor and have no property once her father dies, since she cannot inherit anything.
The importance of decent manners in Pride and Prejudice also makes Elizabeth and Darcy's love far from timeless. Things that they cannot say to one another about the sexual histories of people they know, and about their own romantic desires, are no longer taboo topics in the US at this point in history -- especially on TV and in the movies. Yet their rigid manners do allow them to talk freely about class positions and money. Characters in Pride and Prejudice are well aware how much everyone else makes per year, and it is not at all a secret that people hope to marry into, and seek out the company of, people from their own economic class or higher. To bring up such topics in polite conversation today, however, would be nearly obscene -- nobody chats about how much money they make, or how they married somebody so that they could pay off their student loans. Saying that you don't want to hang out with someone because they're of a different class just isn't done, although it is often undertaken covertly and without discussion. In the nineties, salaries, inheritances and class have taken the place of sex as the unspoken motivation for "love."
Given our current shame surrounding the economic dimensions of romance, one might call Pride and Prejudice, or Emma, financially pornographic. Both the TV show and movie overtly foreground class as perhaps the most important ingredient in love. We never see anyone having sex, but we do see them nakedly having and seeking out money. The version of Emma set in the contemporary US, Clueless, seems to tacitly acknowledge this romantic taboo -- in this version, the Emma figure (named Cher) doesn't try to match her friend with a man of a higher economic class, but with a boy who is just "more popular." Implicitly, he may be richer, but we never know that for certain.
That feeling of timelessness, that sense we get watching these movies and TV that we can "relate" to characters across the ages, is perhaps more accurately a sensation of relief that somewhere, somebody got to admit that they married for money. What we hide in Hollywood movies about the present gets revealed in these Jane Austen movies that recreate the past.

http://classicvideo.com/Filmsheet.cfm?ID=801

3.2) Emma:

Emma turns up not only after Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion (still the best of the lot) and Sense and Sensibility but also in the wake of the comedy Clueless, which borrowed liberally from Austen's 1816 novel. Strangely, Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Emma, looks a little like Clueless star Alicia Silverstone.
Emma tells the tale of the headstrong Emma Woodhouse, who, like Scarlett O'Hara, believes that a woman must have everything. Her best friend is an eligible goose named Harriet (Toni Collette). Harriet receives a perfectly good marriage proposal from a local farmer, but it has been overruled by the ambitious Emma.
Emma's attempt to fix Harriet up with a wan little minister, Mr. Elton (Alan Cumming), meets with trouble, especially after Elton misinterprets Emma's interest in him. Actually, though Emma considers herself quite a hand in matchmaking, she overestimates her abilities in this field.
She should be listening to her older friend Mr. Kingsley, who says, "Better to be without sense than to misapply it." Kingsley himself has to let some of the self-regard out of our heroine, in a scene that's as close to an argument as any moment in Austen. Chastened, Emma resolves to quit her interference and is suitably rewarded.
DIRECTOR and writer (of essays as well as scripts) Douglas McGrath worked his way into the movie business through his screenplay for Bullets Over Broadway, a popular comedy that combines a sort of refined broadness with a tendency to patronize the lesser characters. His script and direction for Emma continue this trend toward obviousness--a heavy underscoring of the matters that Austen suggests--that's heightened by the uneven casting.
Harriet in the book was a lesser flower compared to her friend Emma; here, played by Collette, last seen in the Australian film Muriel's Wedding, Harriet is as broad as a barn door and noticeably dumb. It doesn't do to compare a young and untried actor with a first-rank one, but in the scene in which Collette weeps over a box of puppies because their eyes remind her of the spaniel-like gaze of her lost love Mr. Elton, I couldn't help imaging how Emma Thompson would have handled the business. Instead of a messy torrent of tears, perhaps Thompson would have played it with a bitten lip--her magnificent eyes clouding--and that wonderful "Statue of Tragedy" face that she has demonstrated in farce.
Paltrow is just adequate in the title role, making an indistinct impression, but she's eclipsed by the subsidiary characters. Polly Walker's enigmatic Miss Fairfax, Emma's nemesis, demonstrates how to say much with a few words, deflecting Emma's gossiping questions like a master politician (or like a professional film star, for that matter). Walker is an actress in too short supply on screen.
The same is true (despite an unpleasant mane of sausage curls) of Juliette Stevenson, who alienates one and all as the woman Elton was stupid enough to marry. The most inspired moment of the movie is the sequence in which Stevenson addresses the camera, as if it were a party guest that she'd cornered.
Emma isn't picturesque. The interiors seem to be illuminated by colored patio lights, and there isn't much to capture the eye. In interviews, McGrath has said that American audiences love British landscapes, but to this American they seem like so many misty postcards unless they're helping to tell the story, and Emma lacks immediacy as it is.
Unless someone is planning to film Northanger Abbey--and someone probably is--this will be the end of the Austen cycle. It should be acknowledged what a pleasure it was to see a women's world on screen over the past year or so. One of the great shames of movies lately is how little they're giving women. These Austen adaptations rectified that oversight for a time, turning up as alternatives to cinema that embodied the spirit of young men spoiling for a fight--of which one is far, far wearier than one is of sunbonnets, sheep and English ethnic skirts.

What is timeless about Jane Austen stories is their way of creating entertainment by hiding certain relevant bits of reality: where Austen hides the importance of sexuality, we hide the importance of class. Watching movies about class, however, does make it more difficult to pretend class doesn't exist in our lives today. People marry, fight, fall in love, and create art for money, even if they don't talk openly about it. Therefore one might say that when we watch Jane Austen movies, we are learning just as much about our own present as we are about "history." The difference is in what we edit out, and why.
One thing that doesn't get edited out of any Jane Austen movie, most especially Emma and Clueless, are extremely beautiful women. Rave reviews about these movies, and about Sense and Sensibility too, praised the gorgeous costumes and the voluptuous (or "delicate," in the case of Gwyneth Paltrow) bodies of the women wearing them. Kate Winslet, the actress who played Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, grew tired of being talked about as the beautiful girl in historical dramas, remarking to Entertainment Weekly, "Hey, I'm not just a period babe." Clueless was followed by gossip that Alicia Silverstone had gotten fat and unappealing, making it clear that her acting abilities in the movie were dependent upon her maintaining top babe status. And Emma, as reviewers remarked, might prove that Gwyneth Paltrow can act as well as look fabulous. The point is, even the actors and gossip columnists knew these "educational" movies were less about substance (and substantive acting) than they were about style.
most people did call Sense and Sensibility well-written and acted, just as they noted that Clueless is a fairly sophisticated comedy, like Emma. Somehow, the "beauty" of all these movies and their leading actresses goes hand in hand with their sophistication. After all, we can say Great Books are beautiful too. But what makes Alicia Silverstone's MTV-sexpot beauty seem somehow sanctified when she's part of a plot borrowed from literature? What's the difference between saying "it's beautiful" when we watch Pamela Anderson Lee on Baywatch, and saying that when we watch Paltrow in Emma? Finally, the difference is a matter of class.
Some kinds of beauty are considered classier than others. While there is literally no difference at all between the attractiveness of a Lee or a Paltrow, there is a difference in how they get packaged. Being part of a Jane Austen movie changes not just how female beauty looks (dressed in period costumes, perhaps), but also the context in which a woman gets to be beautiful. We can gawk at Winslet's breasts in Sense and Sensibility -- and believe me, the camera offers us ample opportunity to do so -- without the threat that we're engaging in some sort of vulgar activity like watching Porky's with the rest of the lowest common denominator. All that educational history in Jane Austen movies, and all that open talk about class, makes plain old T & A shots seem somehow uplifting and edifying.
Nowadays, "high class entertainment" doesn't necessarily mean entertainment that's made by and for royalty and the upper classes, as it did in Jane Austen's day. Hollywood movies and BBC productions of Jane Austen stories are generally the culture of the middle-class. Such productions aren't going to be giant blockbusters that make multi-millionaires out of their directors and actors. Their "classiness" comes from within. Their plots and mannered exchanges revolve around the upper classes and those aspiring to them. More importantly, however, they recall an era when literature was a pleasure reserved only for the upper classes who could afford university educations. Those educated classes are the ones who, over time, refined an idea of beauty which isn't sullied by hard labor and physicality, a beauty which is essentially available to people who never have to engage in anything other than leisure activities.
This is exactly the kind of beauty that people in the US, with their democratic ways and kitschy culture, supposedly dislike and don't understand. We have never had nobles to patronize the arts; and we are a country full of people who get a high school education, complete with Jane Austen novels, for free. But suddenly we're flocking to movies and TV which educate us in the very values of class privilege and elitist beauty that democracy is designed to abolish. Really, though, what's to be surprised about? Just like Elizabeth Bennett, we're trying to marry up. We don't have a Mr. Darcy, though, so instead we consume high class culture for a little while to make ourselves feel like we're not so poor anymore.
We live in a nation where public education in universities is becoming prohibitively expensive, where the middle-class is disappearing into a gap between a vast majority of impoverished people and an elite group of wealthy ones. Even movies are so expensive ($7.50 a pop in the theater) that most of us can hardly afford to see as many as we'd like. Watching a Jane Austen movie, like any other Hollywood fantasy, gives us a fairy tale that we know isn't possible in real life: cheaper education, and upward mobility. We can pretend that Jane Austen's culture is our culture now -- the culture of that lowest common denominator, also known as the lower classes.
The frank talk about class that makes Austen's work seem so "historical" could be our frank talk about class -- it could even be a critical discussion of why class is an ongoing problem and source of social dysfunction. But admitting that money might determine our emotional lives, and that education might be a matter of class, would make Jane Austen's stories just a little too present-day for comfort. That's why we conceal our desire to grapple with the conflicts caused by wealth behind a desire for culture and beauty. Culture is not going to pay our bills, however, and Jane Austen movies will not supply the money for the bachelor's degree we need to get a high-paying job. Ironically, watching these movies for their educational value and beauty may obscure the very economic issues that we would do well to learn most about.

http://www.eserver.org/bs/27/annalee.html

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.08.96/emma-9632.html

3.3)Mansfield Park:

When Patricia Rozema agreed to make a film of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, she wanted it to be more than the latest in a long line of Austen-inspired social satires of repressed emotions, English class struggles and parlor-room power games.
We've had many such films of late -- good ones, such as Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Emma. But Rozema took her film to the next step -- incorporating the spirit, personality, letters and diaries of Austen herself.
As both screenwriter and director, Rozema converted Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, from a quietly undemonstrative central figure to an outspoken and determined young woman with a mind of her own.
In other words, she turned her into Jane Austen.
The resulting film is a smart hybrid: part novel adaptation, part biography. It's now a period saga overlaid with a modern sensibility.
Surprisingly, the daring combination not only works, it's also witty, sexy, droll and eminently entertaining.
The basic elements of Mansfield Park are in place: Fanny Price is the poor relation who gets to grow up on the estate of her aunt and uncle, only to find herself planted in a hothouse of romantic schemes, collapsing family fortunes and manipulated marriage proposals.
Moreover, Fanny discovers the household is financed by the slave trade, a fact amplified from a relatively brief mention in the novel. The outspoken Fanny objects to such suffering "paying for the party at Mansfield Park."
As the story unfolds, Fanny must fight her way out of a marriage contrived for her against her wishes while simultaneously finding her own way in the male-dominated society of the day.
Australian actress Frances O'Connor enlivens Fanny with a charismatic, glowing performance. In support, Jonny Lee Miller is frustrating and affecting as the young cousin who lacks the confidence to pursue Fanny, while writer-turned-actor Harold Pinter is stern and appropriately unrevealing as the patriarch of Mansfield Park.
Mansfield Park is bound to offend hard-core Janeites, the Austen fans looking for a lock-step adaptation of the novel. They'll also probably be shocked to discover a few moments of nudity.
However, open-minded filmgoers -- and the many unfamiliar with the novel -- should be pleased by this delightful fantasia on the work and life of Jane Austen.

Mansfield Park is a turn of the century (18th century going on 19th) story about love among the classes as well as an examination into proper society and family ties.
Ten year old Fanny Price (Hannah Taylor-Gordon, Jakob the Liar), taken from her mother and father and the poverty in which they dwell, is sent to live with her aunt and the privileged class at Mansfield Park, under the stern patriarchal hand of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter, Mojo)
Spending her days reminded of her lower status, she also invents and writes fanciful stories during her private times. Fanny eventually grows to become a beautiful, intelligent, and engaging heroine (quite unlike the rather reserved character which Ms. Austen originally penned in her novel.)
The result is a central character that is immediately appealing. As the grown Fanny, Australian actress Frances O'Connor (All About Adam) does wonderfully textured work. At times, Ms. Rozema has Fanny address the camera directly to communicate many of the novel's more introspective observations. This is a difficult device to work seamlessly into a period film and it is to Ms. O'Connor's credit that it works as well as it does.
The central theme which gives the story its legs in an old one... Whether it is better to marry for love or for social standing? Fanny has fallen in love with her cousin Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller, Plunkett & Macleane) who appears fond of her as well. His attentions are soon divided as the stylish and socially acceptable Mary Crawford (Embeth Davidtz, Bicentennial Man) enters the picture along with her equally acceptable brother Henry (Alessandro Nivola, Inventing the Abbotts) who eventually sets his romantic sights upon Fanny.
While Mary and Henry are evidently less than sincere in their affections, their presence does provide the movie and the main characters with the necessary conflict that keeps our interest until the film's appropriately Austen-like ending.
Other thematic devices include a awkwardly inserted reference to the source of the wealth of Mansfield Park... the slave trade. There is also a hint of both lesbianism and incest but neither is carried very far and is soon forgotten.
The motivation for marriage remains the primary thematic thrust. Fanny's cousin, Maria Bertram (Victoria Hamilton, Persuasion) is an example of one making a poor match, marrying a well-to-do fool who is able to make her comfortable, but never happy. Fanny's own mother, trapped in her chosen life of squalor warns Fanny by admitting that her situation is due to the fact that she "married for love."
Fanny, given those two terrible examples, and faced with the same choice is understandably indecisive as to which way to lean.
The spiritual answer, of course, lies in the middle of those two extremes. Marriage is not a cold, calculating decision based upon self-preservation. Neither is it a senseless decision made in the warm afterglow of a passionate embrace.
In the purest sense, marriage forms an insoluble union whereby two people agree to function as one.
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Matthew 19:5 [KJV]
Love and logic can be combined. God's Word contains both. So does a marriage based upon His truth.

http://www.rochestergoesout.com/mov/m/mansfi.html

3.4)Sense and Sensibilty:

DIRECTED BY: Ang Lee

Is this ever a costume drama! Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and practically every other British actor you can think of romp thorough the country in funny clothes in this clever adaptation of Jane Austen's novel about impoverished girls hunting for husbands. Of the recent crop of movies about Britons in by-gone eras falling in love out-of-doors, this is by far the best. The script (by Emma Thompson) is witty and well-paced; the crisp, brisk direction by Ang Lee (who made, most recently, Eat Drink Man Woman) keeps the slow-paced lives of the 19th century from ever becoming boring. This movie deals with Love and Romance like they made it in the old days--big, sweeping and stormy.

http://weeklywire.com/filmvault/tw/s/senseandsensibility.html

Jene Austen fans had every reason to be worried about the new film of ''Sense and Sensibility.''
It was adapted by a novice screenwriter. It co-starred Hugh Grant, whose recent performances have been little more than nervous tics. And it was directed by a man who once blithely described Austen's genre as ''situation comedy.''
Well, they needn't have worried. The adaptation is lovely. Grant is charming. And the direction, throughout, is assured.

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