Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in Pride & Prejudice
Ben van Welzen breaks down what makes the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s best known novel such a successful film.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a romance story in the setting of Regency England, must be in debt to Jane Austen. Of course, much like Austen’s own opening line of Pride and Prejudice about that other universally acknowledged truth, this claim is a bit too terse; it does a great disservice to the romance artists to indebt them to one author, and a great disservice to Austen to box her work into one genre. In fact, her novels often read more as class satire and familial dramas with a romance powering the narrative engine. Nevertheless, a mention of Austen is nearly unavoidable when discussing romance literature — and even romance film — especially if it happens to take place before the mid-19th century. Indeed, IU’s own Lilly Library recently had an exhibit, Love in the Library, exploring the histories and tropes of the romance genre, and the first two display cases were entitled “Before Austen” and “Jane Austen.” Her novels have found healthy lives in the two centuries since her death, and none of them have captured the cultural mind quite like Pride and Prejudice, especially in its translation to the screen. From faithful big-budget adaptations to Bollywood musicals and modern-day rom-coms, Austen’s seminal work has taken many forms in just the last 30 years (we even got a zombie horror-comedy, cleverly titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). This grab-bag assortment of genres and settings does not just emphasize the story’s timelessness, but instead it reveals Austen’s depth and flexibility as a canvas onto which new generations may paint their worlds.
Compared to any of the other aforementioned adaptations, Joe Wright’s 2005 film Pride & Prejudice has enjoyed the most widespread love and acclaim, and for great reason. Wright’s film — propelled by Deborah Moggach’s carefully adapted screenplay — distills Austen’s narrative down to its essentials, narrowing its sights on the central story of Elizabeth Bennett (Keira Knightley) and Fitzwilliam Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) to produce a fiery period drama that firmly positions itself in the early 2000s boom of the romance genre. In fact, having never read the original novel until recently, the existence and cult-following of the 2005 film had long deceived me into believing Pride and Prejudice to be a more romantic book than it is. Much more of a scathing satirical indictment of classism and an examination of the religious, social, and cultural structures that fuel such (get this) pride and prejudice, the novel’s themes are precisely teed up by that famous opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). Again, though, Wright’s ability to transform this sprawling social commentary into an intimate romance pays testament to the unshakeable scaffolding of Austen’s work; the film does not lose Austen’s voice in adaptation, but rather it folds her attitudes and ideas into an exciting modern framework.
At the center of the film, in runtime and in theme, lies a scene that perfectly demonstrates the subtle shift from 19th to 21st century: Darcy’s first proposal. In both iterations of the story, this moment immediately follows Elizabeth learning that Darcy had interfered with her sister’s marriage attempts, and thus caused her family’s emotional turmoil. The film sets the proposal scene in the middle of a rainstorm in the woods, with Elizabeth taking shelter and Darcy emerging from the storm to deliver his confession. Darcy opens the dialogue with:
“Miss Elizabeth, I have struggled in vain and I can bear it no longer. These past months have been a torment. I came to Rosings with the single object of seeing you, I had to see you. I have fought against my better judgement, my family’s expectation, the inferiority of your birth, my rank and circumstance, all these things that I’m willing to put aside and ask you to end my agony. I love you. Most ardently. Please do me the honor of accepting my hand.”
With his sopping wet clothes, desperate gaze, and pleading voice, Darcy’s long speech checks all the boxes for a swoon-worthy climactic romance scene in the rain, and quite effectively so. By contrast, the book sets the scene in the quiet home of Elizabeth’s awkward cousin. In this much less passionate setting, Darcy enters the home by surprise and walks “towards [Elizabeth] in an agitated manner,” simply saying, “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you” (Austen 178).
Darcy in the rain
With such a short confession, Austen’s version of Darcy does not plead nor pine, and he immediately shuts down and goes cold once Elizabeth pushes back on his proposal. The novel’s proceeding conversation quickly turns vicious, with Darcy revealing that he “did everything in [his] power to separate [his] friend from [Elizabeth’s] sister” and that he may “rejoice in [his] success” (180), while Elizabeth bites back that his “arrogance, conceit, and selfish disdain of the feelings of others … have built so immovable a dislike” (182). For the film, though the content of the scene does not change much, the underlying intimacy and chance for passionate reconciliation keeps simmering below the surface. As the storm picks up, Darcy closes the gap between him and Elizabeth as they argue, ending their feud with a tense break of rain-filled silence as they sneak a glance at each other’s lips to tease the forbidden kiss that such a perfect setup often demands in such a film. Still, despite the undeniable electricity of the moment, the film holds strong and denies any premature intimacy that would betray the story and its source material.
Through these key tonal incongruences from book to film, Wright’s adaptation highlights the genre trappings and seeming narrative requirements of a 2000s romance movie, turning it into a record of the genre’s progression. For instance — along with the scene above — the two most iconic moments from Wright’s film are completely original to the adaptation: first, when the film cuts to a close-up of Darcy flexing his hand after he brushes against Elizabeth and, second, the properly climactic finale when Darcy proclaims “you have bewitched me body and soul.” These striking moments make a viewer, or at least me, blush and fawn over the recognizably romantic gestures, but their absence from the novel suggests them to be decidedly modern. When holding Austen’s novel as a firm truth upon which we can compare modern senses and sensibilities, such an adaptation has much modern cultural and artistic history to reveal.
Moreover, we can invert this comparison and turn the lens back to the past and back to Jane Austen. Perhaps, for instance, Wright’s adaptation is not a subtle shift towards the more explicitly romantic and sensual, but rather just a proportional increase in romanticism relative to the cultural shift of the last two centuries. In other words, returning to the rainy proposal, we as a modern audience can interpret film-Darcy’s long-winded monologue through 21st-century standards and translate them to book-Darcy’s shorter proclamation of love; a faithful adaptation suggests that Darcy’s brevity in 1813 would have been just as romantic as Darcy’s verbosity undeniably is in 2005. In this manner, when artists return to adapt and evolve the same source material — especially those as powerful and skillful as Wright — they provide another entry in a cultural and artistic dictionary, a means to translate from one era’s sensibilities across all the other eras.
Even on its own, though, Wright’s film is simply a stunning evocation of the book’s era, and its striking formal choices elevate it beyond a simple adaptation. In its painterly framing and carefully constructed mise en scène, Pride & Prejudice does effectively capture the fraught balance of grandiosity and intimacy at play in Austen’s subtler narrative details, but Wright’s mobility and fluidity allow his voice to still pierce through. At key emotional moments, Wright tends to position the camera in an extreme long shot, placing single characters in unpopulated landscapes that resemble paintings of the same era, both paying homage to the source material and grounding the story in the period. On the other hand, during every ball scene, Wright lets loose behind the camera. The film opts for shockingly long takes during these scenes, with the camera fluidly moving through the expertly choreographed hordes of people to become part of the dance itself. In particular, in the second ball of the film, when there are nine named characters to track and the Bennets’ livelihoods at stake, Wright pulls off the most impressive long take of the film, bobbing and weaving through corridors, graciously gliding over the figures of our protagonists, incorporating into the horde and dancing through the chaos.
My personal favorite moment of this ball, and perhaps my favorite moment of the film, directly contradicts this frenetic frenzy of the crowd. At the ball, despite the rising tensions, Darcy asks Elizabeth to dance, and as they sink into the motions, the rest of the crowd completely disappears. The two to-be-lovers go silent as the music rises and they perform their dance, loaded with passion, disdain, and intimacy as the camera swoops around them. In this moment, Wright gets to the center of his adaptation, quite literally letting all other characters and narratives fall away for the dance of Darcy and Lizzy. Moreover, this moment enhances the film’s place in its own histories and influences; perhaps it’s a reference to the same disappearing crowd of 1961’s West Side Story, or maybe it’s an homage to the dance through time in Max Ophüls’s Madame de…, or maybe it’s just how intimate Wright felt when reading Austen’s novel. No matter what, Pride & Prejudice finds a way to throw it all together, to embrace its roots, enjoy its genre trappings, and have so much fun doing it.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Vintage Books, 2007. Originally published 1813.
In celebration of its 20th anniversary and Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice will be screened at IU Cinema on December 13 at 7pm.