My husband and I watched a Jane Austen film, "Mansfield Park" last night and then sat talking about all her novels and the film versions for about an hour. It was interesting, especially because the better the novel, the better it's been filmed. I think her best work is Persuasion, and that is the film most perfect and perfectly cast. "Pride and Prejudice" has several lovely versions on film, and "Sense and Sensibility" and "Emma" have one version each that works well. "Northanger Abbey" is hard to film, but has been done adequately once, and "Mansfield Park" is the most problematic, as the novel itself suffers from priggish main characters, too much black and white quality, and a less effervescent text. I believe Austen was testing what was good and what was evil, and she got a bit preachy.
The version we saw last night has an overlay of feminism, because the writer and director tried to conflate Jane Austen and Fanny Price. It distorts the book and makes Jane Austen more simplified and modern than she can have been. I also don't like the movies about Jane Austen much. But probably because I can't see the point in making her into a character. I've lived with Austen's works all my life and for my first decades reread them all several times a year. I often say some of my morality I stole from those books, and it's true, in that she had the complexity I was seeking, and conflicted main characters who struggled with what they wanted and what they wanted to be. So seeing the films is like looking through an album of photos of old friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment