Orgulho e Preconceito

I saw Pride & Prejudice at a screening a week ago and absolutely loved it. The movie boasts great production values for such a small project.

The story has been modified and updated from the original source material, but not to the detriment of the spirit of Jane Austen. There were a lot of in-jokes to Austen fans--keep an eye out for the address on the mailbox! The script mixes witty dialogue with physical comedy--something for both senses of humor.

Someone finally made a local movie with decent actors. Kam Heskin is a great Elizabeth. Jane (Sola) is adorable and her counterpart Charles (Gourley) is just delicious--I could eat him up. Darcy (Seale) is appropriately heart-breaking and dashing. Lydia and Kitty were hysterical.

I loved the parallels between 19th Century England and modern Mormons in America. This is a movie in which the characters happens to be LDS, its not a movie about being LDS. That aspect was very refreshing. Are all the characters perfect depictions of model LDS youth? No! And neither are most of the people in my ward. However, I recognized all the characters.

If you go into this movie expecting Singles Ward you might be disappointed. Or you might be thrilled. Pride & Prejudice is infinatly smarter than its Mollywood predecessors. I've heard both sides from people. Those who loved Singles Ward may think that nothing will hold a candle to it. Then there are the people like me, who liked Singles Ward, but are ready for a movie that is more intelligent and has better production values.

In all I can't wait to see Pride & Prejudice again.

I am a big Jane Austen fan and I am a big fan of the A&E miniseries and so my boyfriend took me to see this. It was a big waste of our time. I thought that Elizabeth was RUDE and why anyone liked her I will never know. Why do filmmakers have to ruin a potentially good movie by making the characters LDS? We walked out on this movie halfway through and rented Bridget Jones's Diary which is a better modern day adaptation than this piece of trash.

If you're attracted to the P&P story line and are entertained by the idea of the plot working itself out in different cultural contexts, then this is the movie for you. The context here is the LDS or "Mormon" culture of Utah. Like "Clueless," the movie's strength comes from recycling the plot of one of Austen's classic novels. As it is, it's fun, though rough around the edges.

P&P poses some real challenges when you transport it to a modern setting, since a lot of the things that mattered to women in the Regency period just don't matter any more. By placing the story in the LDS context, the producers subjected the women to a culture with a few crucial similarities. I know very little about the LDS culture, but the film suggests that LDS women *want* to get married and the men expect them to be virgins. This gives the story its foundation.

This is clearly a low budget production. It shows in some of the technical aspects and in the acting, but the actors are at least competent. There's lots of gentle humor, but the movie lacks the sharp wit that is Austen's trademark.

This movie would have been better off in its own orbit somewhere in a faraway galaxy and not associating itself, even remotely, with Austen's Pride and the Prejudice. Instead, it comes across more-like Connie Francis' Where the Boys Are (1965, Ft. Lauderdale, Spring Break). It ignores the plight of a woman who bases her own social situation on the social standing of her prospective mate. Characters, in this movie, serve very little purpose. Lydia, Kitty, Mary, and Mr. Bingley are colorless and idle and are about nothing (great teeth, however). There is no Mrs. Bennett to light the fire of 'hurry-up and marry'. No Mr. Bennett to promote non-conformity and boredom. Mr. Collins, who is traditionally portrayed as the gallant knight of the Kings James Version, is the awkward oaf but never the marital threat that made his character funny. This Wickam doesn't even come close to being an illusion of a 'fine catch'. Jane and Lizzie aren't even sisters, figuratively, in this weak rendition. But, even this movie couldn't reduce Mr. Darcy. And what woman can resist a man who says 'I'm wrong. I'm sorry. Forgive me. I love you'? (sigh) Ha! The Austen tribute in the movie comes too late. It was like receiving that expensive after-dinner-mint when you've only supped on a bologna sandwich.

I really wanted to like this movie. Modern day adaptations and twists on Austen can be wonderful, many on here have mentioned Clueless, another great one is the Lost in Austen miniseries.

The problem here is not so much the Mormon setting, but the limitations and constraints that Mormon culture appears to put on the writers in terms of plot. I gleaned enough of the cultural setting from other reviewers on here for that to more or less make sense (those reviewers are correct in that it's not very well explained/explained at all).

So what's good? It's nice, bright and colourful. Casting the five sisters as various college friends was an interesting idea. The main actress playing Elizabeth is very watchable. The actor playing Darcy is competent (even if he often looks uncannily like Adrian Lukas, who plays Wickham in the definitive BBC adaptation). Chemistry is more or less there. The quotes from Austen, had they been less hideously pinkly presented, were nearly an interesting touch.

The problem is tone. Austen's work is sharp and exacting, biting, witty and harsh. This was bland. It lacked edge. One got the sense that there was a culturally religious nicely-nicely thing going on here, and it just doesn't work with the background material.

There were slapstick moments that really jarred: particularly in "imagination" sequences - ie they didn't really happen. (Is slapstick perhaps a more tolerable form of humour to Mormons than satire or saucier wit?) Regardless, the movie should have had the guts to follow through with these moments if it wanted that tone, instead of: "no, not really! It didn't really happen, it was just in her mind!" every time. In doing so it weakened the heroine and made her look passive and victimy.

It's hard to fit a novel like Pride & Prejudice into a feature film length, as there are so many characters, and that weakness showed here. The writers would have been better to reduce the amount of female characters (Mary's and Charlotte's roles were mixed up anyway) and they did at least axe one of the Bingley sisters. But ultimately Kitty and Lydia felt very extraneous. From memory, Clueless was slimmed down in terms of supporting cast compared to Emma.

All in all it's a pleasant, visually colourful movie to watch. But it lacks edge, guts and is at times painfully naive. Which, given its religious subtext, is perhaps unsurprising.