Mansfield Park

After watching the more recent movie version of this movie, I must admit I put off watching this one for fear they would be similar. I'd read the book years ago and enjoyed it, although not as much as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. I finally got around to viewing this about a month after I'd purchased the box set and was VERY pleasantly surprised. It stayed very faithful to the book and unlike a few of the other reviews I read here, I did not find it at all dull nor did i find the acting lacking in any fashion.

I especially liked the development of the relationships between Fanny, Tom and Edmund. It was neat seeing them grow and mature over the course of the mini-series.

I was also impressed with the interactions between the Crawfords. The characters had always irked me a bit in the story but in this version they came across as more subtle.

This is unquestionably the best ever adaptation of this book, faithful to the text and faithful to the feeling of the book. Sylvestra le Touzel is appropriately mouse-like and really embodies the real Fanny Price, (one of my favourite Austen heroines). She displays that transcendence of flesh that Austen uses as a metaphor for stability in an increasingly precarious situation, both for the estate and for the individuals associated with it. More recent adaptations have tried to make Fanny more capricious and human... but that is not what she is about. She represents the rise of the diligent lower classes to dominate the corrupt aristocracy, of merit over money, and morality over license. She and Edmund are the eventual winners, custodians of their inheritance, when all the favoured children have fallen into sin and temptation and proved themselves unworthy. Fanny Price is not so very different from Jane Bennett, Anne Elliot or Elinor Dashwood. I don't understand why so many people find her character "difficult"

It's true that this version is a bit long and should only be attempted by real aficionados of Austen's work. I prefer it to the 1999 version, but someone looking to be entertained for an afternoon ought to look elsewhere. I didn't mind the actress who played Fanny as much as everybody else seems to. I won't praise her acting, but found it not much worse than anyone else's. She looked the part so much more than Frances O'Connor and played it with the necessary timidity that the other actress completely ignored. Edmund, I thought, looked all wrong for the part. I suppose this is a debatable point, but I felt his features were too old and his expressions too severe. Edmund was meant to be serious but warm. It is a subtlety that I felt, unfortunately, neither he nor the 1999 actor got right. The worst choice was Henry Crawford. His portrayal was so off and confusing that I found it hard to focus on the rest of the film. The actor played Crawford so flamboyantly that it is hard to imagine he made so many girls fall in love with him. Those are all of my real complaints; otherwise I found it an enjoyable, faithful adaptation of a wonderful book.

Low budget films and television productions have to be accepted for what they are. That being said, the 1983 Mansfield Park still has a distinctive on-location look and the cast is uniformly strong - Sylvestra Le Touzel has just the right mix of prettiness and austerity and Nicholas Farrell is excellent as Edmund.

Where the 1999 film sacrificed the book's moral subtlety for pretty obvious ends (Fanny becomes a sort of pseudo-feminist icon, but of course back in the eighteenth century, before it was cool) the 1983 film contains all the troubled morality of the book - its characters, many of whom are failures in way or another, are presented with sympathy and irony, and the faithfulness of the screenplay is infinitely to be preferred to the 1999 film's racy, but ultimately pedestrian value system.

If you enjoy Jane Austin's novels, this is the best of the two available versions of Mansfield Park. It is very true to the book, but lacks the beautiful production values and outstanding cinematography of the 1999 version that stars Frances O'Connor.

Fanny Price has always been a problematic character for Austin's fans. Many that read the book when it was published in the early 1800s found her unbearable compared to Austin's other, more spirited heroines. Sylvestra Le Touzel does a nice job in this very challenging role.

The best performance in the movie, though, is Jackie Smith Wood's Mary Crawford. Mary is beautiful, flirtatious, morally confused, good hearted and shallow, all at once. She is one of the more complicated characters in all of Austin's novels, and Jackie Smith-Wood plays her to the hilt. It's a mystery why such a terrific performance did not yield further opportunities, but her career seems to have evaporated after this role.

This is a movie for the more patient Austin fan. The pacing is measured, and the characters, particularly Edmund and Mary Crawford, evolve as the story moves forward. Mansfield Park, unlike Austin's other successful novels, is really about the failed love affair between Edmund and Mary. As a result, it is a more somber read than Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. The wedding at the end is a natural result of Edmund coming home to Fanny as the one stable element in his life.

It's a solid movie with good acting and a complicated plot. It is well worth seeing.