Free Critical Thinking On The Sarcastic Modernity Of Joe Wright’s 2005 Adaptation Of Pride And Prejudice

In the world of Jane Austen adaptations, Joe Wright’s 2005 film Pride and Prejudice proves itself incredibly innovative in its approach. Prior attempts at adapting Austen works, including Pride, focus on a clean-cut, ornate and incredibly stately world of Victorian England, with upper-class characters spending the entire film in eloquent settings and speaking in decidedly unapproachable manners. Wright, along with screenwriter Deborah Moggach, eschew this aesthetic in order to provide their adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with a more casual, approachable take on the classic Jane Austen romance, complete with a greater emphasis on naturalism, grit and approachability.
One of the most prominent elements of Wright’s take on Pride and Prejudice is its setting: rather than being set in the 19th century, Wright and Moggach transport the setting further back in time to the 18th century. This has the effect of making the film’s settings – the Bennet house, Mr. Darcy’s estate – decidedly less refined and stately than in prior adaptations and the book itself. The Bennet household, for instance, is depicted like a run-down wooden farmhouse, with Mr. Bennet (Donald Sutherland) more like a humble farmer than a member of the landed gentry. The same level of detail and stateliness exists in Wright’s film as in Austen’s novel and prior adaptations, but is applied to much more lower-class climes: the Bennet sisters are largely dressed in peasant clothes, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet dress in humble frocks and waistcoats, and so on. In one comedic aside, a pig nonchalantly walks through the hallway of the house, virtually without comment. These visual and thematic elements introduce a class distinction between the Bennets and Mr. Darcy that is not quite as acute in the novel which, combined with the more ornate clothing of the changed 18th-century setting, provides a visual dynamism that makes Pride and Prejudice more appealing for modern audiences.
The cinematic enunciation of Pride and Prejudice is clear from the outset of Wright’s fastidious, detail-oriented and elaborate mise-en-scene, which permeates the film with a distinct sense of history and texture. From the beginning, the nature of the filmic adaptation makes clear that this is explicitly Elizabeth’s story, rather than an ensemble piece that focuses just as much on the supporting characters. Elizabeth’s point of view permeates the entire film from a cinematic perspective, with frequent over-the-shoulder and POV shots meant to show the audience the world through her eyes. Wright’s direction and cinematography create distinct divides between the prim, proper and ornate Darcy estate and the run-down Bennet household, with static, painterly shot composition in the former and a greater emphasis on handheld in the later. Wright’s camerawork utilizes sweeping, romantic vistas in one shot (such as Elizabeth’s contemplation of her life in a wide shot overlooking a cliff-side) and humble, unkempt farmland in the other (such as the foggy, muddy moors in which Elizabeth and Darcy meet near the end of the film). Low, naturalistic lighting permeates the entire film, attempting to showcase the contemporary immediacy of the Bennets’ lives as contrasted with the pomp and pageantry of Darcy’s upper-crust colleagues.
The opening sequence of Pride and Prejudice demonstrates the utility of these unique spins (and Wright’s cinematic enunciation) on the classic, more reserved approach to Austen novel adaptations. Rather than coating the film in a heavy sheen of picturesque Victorian landscapes, the opening shot reveals an unadorned green field in early-morning light, a much more domestic and unassuming visage than we would get in most spectacle-based adaptations of Austen works. We then cut to Elizabeth’s reading of a book while walking through the field, its pages yellow with age, the audience unable to make out the text over Keira Knightley’s constantly moving shoulder as she walks. Instead of seeing an elegant estate, the Bennet’s house is run-down, full of pigs and mud, and viewed first from the back as Elizabeth enters. We regularly see cows and ordinary workers in dressed-down clothes hanging laundry or feeding pigs. Chickens flock and run from Elizabeth as she approaches the house. From the beginning, the film’s shift to an earlier, less prosperous time in English history allows the film to exhibit a texture that is more relatable than the upper-class frippery expected of Austen adaptations.
Art and sculpture is also used by Wright in the cinematic enunciation of Pride and Prejudice, deliberately pointing out the level of artifice and winking anachronisms present in the adaptation. Both the Bennet household and Darcy’s estate are adorned with different types of art, framed uniquely by Wright in comparison to the characters. The Bennet sisters, in particular, are often staged next to portraits and busts of women, who are similarly clothed to them: this points out both English society’s desire to treat these women as objects to be admired visually, as well as their status as two-dimensional figures on a film screen. By explicitly comparing the painterly portrait of a duchess with Elizabeth, Wright’s framing placing them on equal planes in the shot, she is treated as both a contrasting low-born woman and yet another object to gaze upon within the diegesis of the film.
Despite the explicit formalism of much of Wright’s cinematic enunciation, all of these attributes contribute to a larger sense of naturalism and realism, which is personified in the performances. While the expectation for these kinds of classic romance films is to cast well-known British actors who are usually older than the roles they are playing, the casting of then-twenty-year-old Keira Knightly matches the actual age of her character, Elizabeth Bennet. The same principle is applied to most of the rest of the cast as well, casting attractive young British and American actors of only relative fame into many of the classic roles. This lends the film a grounded, naturalistic feel that leaves the audience wondering less about watching a star they are already invested in (with only Knightley and older actors like Judi Dench and Donald Sutherland having real star power at the time), and more focused on the character they are playing.
The Bennet sisters, for instance, are shifted from slightly stuffy personalities to bubbly, excited and passionate women, all of whom are boy-crazy and desperate to find love and sex. In one scene, the girls titter maddeningly when discussing the possibility of Mr. Bingley’s singlehood, peering in on their parents’ discussion of it through a cracked door. While Austen described them as “vain, ignorant, idle and absolutely uncontrolled,” Wright’s appraisal of them is far more generous and explicitly comedic (Austen 135). To that end, the film uses them in a charming way rather than setting them as obstacles or opposites to Knightley’s Elizabeth.
Many of their mannerisms and dialogue are heightened by Wright and Hoggam to become more explicitly comedic, Wright using stately framing to heighten the contrast between the Bennet sisters’ girlish behavior and their often-eloquent surroundings. When spending time in Mr. Darcy’s home, Wright films them shifting awkwardly while sitting next to each other in a crowded couch. In a later scene, they comically scramble to fix themselves up and maintain decorum when they hear Mr. Darcy is arriving – Wright performing a shot-reverse shot gag in which Darcy enters, only to abruptly cut to the sisters suddenly prim and proper, sitting in formation awaiting his arrival. Their amusingly schoolgirl-like behavior, combined with their constant appearance in dressing gowns at the Bennet estate, creates a more dynamic, modern portrait of the central characters of the film than is present in Austen’s contemplative, slower-paced novel.
Central to the film’s unique interplay between the attractive stateliness of an Austen novel and its approachable, naturalistic spin is Wright’s direction, which captures all the pageantry of a Merchant-Ivory film while injecting it with much-needed sardonic wit. This is seen very acutely in the courtly dance scene between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfayden). After a series of escalating dares, Darcy and Elizabeth go out on the dance floor, joining the other couples in the highly regimented dance often seen in these kinds of films. In the sceneMen and women engage in an expertly choreographed, timed dance in which they casually move around each other at a slow, deliberate pace; however, Wright chooses to focus his attention on Darcy and Elizabeth, who stand out by engaging in a dialogue scene during the dance itself. Knightley and Macfayden weave between their other dance partners in the large ballroom, Wright choosing to leave the scene in a single shot and pan between the two characters as they exchange dialogue.
Wright’s approach here allows the courtly dance to become symbolic of the sexual dynamic and tension between the two, both Darcy and Elizabeth engaging in their own discursive maneuvers just as they perform the steps of this dance. They are the only two characters speaking, Wright occasionally losing their faces in a sea of constantly moving heads. Their dialogue is teasing, confrontational and sarcastic, almost parodying the staid silence indicative of more straightforward adaptations of the time period:
DARCY: Do you talk, as a rule, while dancing?ELIZABETH: No. I prefer to be unsociable and taciturn. Makes it all so much more enjoyable, don’t you think?
Compare this exchange to the novel itself, in which Elizabeth straightforwardly describes herself and Darcy as being “each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room” (Austen 57). Moggach’s dialogue simplifies the exchange from a four-paragraph discussion into a short, two-line exchange, changing Elizabeth’s reply to something more sarcastic and flirtatious. In doing so, she creates a more accessible, consumable version of the character for modern audiences, accentuating her role as a strong-willed woman who uses her considerable intelligence and wit to navigate her romance with Mr. Darcy. Furthermore, the change in her character’s class status in the film marks her as distinct from Austen’s Elizabeth, who describes herself as “a gentleman’s daughter,” “equal” to Mr. Darcy in class (Austen 206).
In the film’s almost singular focus on the romance between Elizabeth and Darcy, Pride and Prejudice also strikes a more explicitly romantic tone that makes it more accessible to a modern audience. Austen’s Pride spoke specifically about the themes of upbringing, education, societal expectations, and heritage on the whole, charting Elizabeth’s romance with Darcy as yet another example of the struggles people go through to form relationships among the societal expectations of land ownership, money and status that go along with it: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 2). While these elements are also present in Wright’s film, the adaptation makes Elizabeth and Darcy’s romance the primary focus, giving characters like Mr. Wickham, Parson Collins, Mr. Bingley, and Lady Catherine much smaller roles in the background, framing their respective stories around Elizabeth’s instead of being quite as prominent as they were in the book.
Even the film’s final scene, not present in the book, demonstrates the film’s chief focus on showing audiences the romance between Elizabeth and Darcy: the two characters, laying outside Mr. Darcy’s estate in their sleeping clothes, look out at the sky and affectionately quip about what “endearments” they are “allowed” to call each other: “You may only call me ‘Mrs. Darcy’ when you are completely and perfectly and incandescently happy.” This approach solidifies the film’s emphasis on tracking the more individualized, personal romance between the two characters rather than making the larger social critiques that were Austen’s focus. The result is a film that generates much greater accessibility to a modern audience that wishes to see two young, beautiful people fall in love in an elegant, 18th-century setting.
Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice changed a vast number of stylistic and aesthetic elements from both Austen’s novel and prior adaptations to create a more immediate, naturalistic and youth-friendly version of a comparatively inaccessible Victorian romance. By introducing much-needed grit into the surroundings and changing characters to become more realistic and approachable in manner, this version of Pride and Prejudice serves to make a book that is normally considered stuffy and boring by most modern audience standards feel vibrant, fresh and romantic. Through the combination of a younger cast, a re-energized sense of tone, and visuals that combine the assumed stateliness of classic romance with the grittier setting of the 18th century, Wright’s Pride and Prejudice proves itself an immensely admirable and bold adaptation of a classic novel.