Mansfield Park

Rating:
Summary: Significant Departure from Canon
Review: I am a huge Jane Austen fan, and have read all her books at least ten times. This must be clearly understood, or nothing useful can come from this review. (To paraphrase Dickens.)

Mansfield Park is probably the least well-loved of Austen's novels in general, and this is partly because the book is far more serious in tone than her other, more famous works (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey). The heroine, Fanny Price, rather than being healthy, hearty, lively and witty, is a bit weak and sickly of body, serious and studious of mind, and, frankly, a bit of a tedious old stick sometimes. Of all Austen's other characters, Fanny Price most closely resembles Mary Bennet from Pride & Prejudice, who was ridiculed even within her own family for being so serious, so studious, and so completely plain.

Fanny is not an easy character to identify with, or to love, particularly in this day and age of self-help books, support groups, and psychotherapy (all of which she would most likely be involved in were she alive today). She is highly judgmental (or so I found her), for she has extremely high standards of behaviour that her family are all too likely to fail to live up to, and in the novel she seems to serve primarily as a moral compass for the reader. She is also, however, timid to a fault. When she speaks her mind in public, which she is seldom able to do, given how she is treated by most of her family, she often speaks so gently that those who would most benefit from her message never even hear her words.

Given this, the task of bringing Fanny to life on film, would be a daunting one indeed. How to write a screenplay starring a completely un-heroic heroine? The obvious answer - perhaps the only answer - is to change the character of Fanny, and this is what the screenwriter did. In this film, Fanny is everything she is not in the book - funny, lively, healthy, firm, decisive, active, and a writer. (In the book, she is a reader.) She is engaging and easy to identify with. We cheer for her and want her to come out on top, as in the end she must.

The story of Mansfield Park so hinges on Fanny being exactly as Austen wrote her that, after seeing the trailer for the film, I watched the movie more from curiosity than interest. As a film, it is entertaining enough. The story is similar enough to Austen's to satisfy anyone with a taste for the period but no extensive knowledge of the novel, and the casting and acting is good, as I remember. As an adaptation of the work of one of the greatest authors in English literature, however, it falls far short of expectations raised by the excellent recent versions of several other Austen works, Pride and Prejudice (BBC 1995), Emma (also BBC), and Sense and Sensibility (with Emma Thompson). It is no more faithful an adaptation than the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice (starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson), whose Lady Catherine disappointed me by being nice at the end.

The most jarring difference between the book and the movie, for me, was the reference to slaves providing the family's income. The eldest son's (Tom's) discovery and knowledge of exactly what has provided him with his comfortable life, is one of the movie's most dramatic, and certainly its most brutal, moments. In the book, Austen makes no reference whatsoever to what provides the family's income. She was, after all, a (mostly) gentle satirist about society and manners, and although she likely knew about slavery, there could be no need to mention it in her works of fiction. Indeed, in the book the prolonged absence of Sir Thomas Bertram (the story's other moral compass) seems engineered solely to allow his family to behave very badly indeed, and get themselves into such situations as could never have arisen had he been around, for life was very dull and predictable when he was around. There was no especial need for the destination to be Antigua; anywhere some weeks' distance away would have done just as well.

The injection of the modern sensibility of abhorrence of slavery seemed to me to be gratuitous, and an indication that, although he had a flair for the dramatic, the screenwriter had no particular understanding of or love for the original work, nor the patience to work through Austen's own plotline to the end. We did get there eventually, but I found this movie much less satisfying than the book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent film
Review: Not a true adaptation, but a first-rate film that examines the dark undercurrents of wealth, advantage, and gender inequity in an early 19th century context. A modern examination of age-old circumstances. Imagine the indelicate and real subtexts that Jane Austen didn't want to address, or could not, and you might appreciate their handling here. Illustrates how gentility is only a generation or two removed from ruthless profiteering. Stunning cinematography, and still a gut-wrenching romance in a period setting that resolves nicely. The acting is superb. Cheers.

Rating:
Summary: Takes a risk and wins
Review: I have recently become a Jane Austen fanatic, reading everything of hers I could get my hands on - which includes her letters and juvenelia. As an Austen devotee, I get frustrated with film adaptations of her novels. The more slavishly accurate to the book they are, the angrier I get that some of my favorite bits are left out. This is why "Mansfield Park" by Patricia Rozema is one of my favorite Austen adaptations. It combines all of her works and her life with the story "Mansfield Park" and interprets the themes written by a master of subtlety and sly wit so that they can be better understood by today's viewer without dumbing it down. She infuses the main character, Fanny Price (marvelously and charmingly played by Frances O'Conner), with the wit of the authoress herself.

Fanny is one daughter of a large, poor family sent to live with her wealthy relatives, who consider her as "not their equal" except for her cousin Edmund, with whom she falls in love. He shows every sign of holding her in equal regard until the siblings Crawford (Mary and Henry - beautifully done by the brilliant Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola) arrive and throw everything off balance. But that's just the surface story.

The fortune of Fanny's cousins has been bought with the blood of slaves - a storyline that was merely hinted at in the novel. The place of women in late 18th/early 19th century Britian is clearly presented, as Fanny is shown as a sexual object to Henry, Sir Thomas, (her uncle, in another marvelous performance by Harold Pinter) her father, and even Mary. When Fanny refuses to marry Henry, she is unforgivingly shipped back to her mother and father in disgusting poverty in Portsmouth. Fanny's mother encourages her to marry the rake Henry, since she married for love and lives now in destitute misery. Fanny is luckier than the woman she was crafted after - Austen never married, although she did accept a man's proposal and then turn him down the next morning (a fact Rozema worked into the film). Another clever part of the film is the dual role of Lindsay Duncan, who plays both Lady Bertram and Fanny's mother. She is barely recognizable as Fanny's mother - and it is a sly way of showing just how important marrying for money was.

Patricia Rozema, who also wrote the script, clearly has a great regard for Austen and did a lot of research before crafting this daring interpretation. If you listen to the commentary, she explains a lot of her choices for what she did, and she did none of it to cash in on the recent Austen adaptation craze. She loves her actors and her subject, and it's a real pleasure to listen to her talk about the film she made. "Mansfield Park" is an accurate portrayal of the woman who wrote it. For those who think the film is too obviously feminist or risque, perhaps they should do as much research on the author as Rozema did. Austen's juvenelia especially shows that her humor was broad - she makes fun of everything - marriage, drunkenness, friendship, wealth, murder, even cannibalism. "Mansfield Park" is intelligent, funny, and I always leave it with a smile. Highly, highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Did this director actually read the book?
Review: This movie screams lesbian director so if that's more your agenda than the style and flair of Jane Austen, you may love this version.

It is, however, so far removed from Austen that it is painful to watch.

Frances O'Connor is a fine actress who deserved a better vehicle.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant directorial choices
Review: "Mansfield Park" is based on Jane Austen's novel of the same name and on Jane Austen's letters. The film is not a perfect reflection of the novel, and it wasn't meant to be. Director Patricia Rozema is clear in her audio commentary that Jane Austen's life and wit substantially influenced the film's interpretation of the story. In the book, the heroine Fanny Price is voiceless on every level--economically, socially, expressively. Her meekness and what comes of the quiet morality with which she lives, in a society that prized manners and position (expressions of convention), are at the heart of Austen's story. In a way, the story is about what happens when Fanny does nothing in a world of social machinations where everybody else is skillfully employing a behavioural code that Fanny cannot herself engage.

Here, Rozema has fashioned Fanny into an inventive writer as a way to allow her to express an acute observational wit that the book's Fanny would never have had. This Fanny has spirit, and makes choices, though within the sometimes cruel confines of her position. Austen faithfuls may end up hating this change, but giving Fanny this voice allows the film literary romance and makes Fanny a heroine for a commercial audience. At its core, it's still a morality tale, honest, lucid, and witty about the compromises that inform Fanny's social world, a task that too few films manage to achieve. Its heart understanding of human pride and suffering is compelling.

As a filmaker, Rozema wonderfully brings the spirit of Austen to the screen. The script (which Rozema wrote) and staging are spare, well-chosen, and uncompromising. There's a lot of subtlety in her choices. The Amazon review doesn't mention that she also directed the "Bach Cello Suites" project with Yo-Yo Ma. This is obviously a very different work, but you can see the same delicate sensibility here.

The audio commentary is one of the most interesting that I've heard. Rozema isn't self-involved the way some commentators are. She gives you interesting stuff in an engaging way--the reasons behind her choices, historical details, bits about the acting. If you like Austen, or "Mansfield Park," and you're interested in writing, love, or social honesty, the DVD is a fine purchase.

Rating:
Summary: Patricia Rozema's creative retelling of the Austen novel
Review: "Mansfield Park" might have been part of the wave of adaptations of Jane Austen novels that made the long dead British novelist one of the hottest writers in Hollywood for a couple of years, but this is a different sort of Jane Austen, perhaps best represented by the brief nudity of a pivotal scene. Of course, writer-director Patricia Rozema makes no claims to be providing a faithful version of the novel, choosing instead to offer a credit that declares the film to be based on the novel along with passages from Austen's journals, letters, and early writings. Consequently, "Mansfield Park" is transformed from a novel centered on a most serious debate about religion and religious duty into a concerted attack upon the British upper class, laid out against the central character's prospects for finding a husband.

The central character in question is Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor), a self-effacing young woman with flashing eyes and strong opinions, which she might put down on paper but would never say out loud. As a young girl Fanny is sent by her mother from the family's squalid city hovel to live with the Bertrams, rich cousins living in the country at the titular manor. Fanny has formed a strong bond of friendship with the youngest Bertram son, Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), but is being urged to marry the young rake, Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola), by Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter). Separated from her beloved sister (there is always a beloved sister for an Austen heroine), save for their letters, Fanny becomes friends with Henry's sister Mary (Embeth Davidtz), who has her own eye on Edmund. Consequently "Mansfield Park" offers the standard sort of mismatched affection that is always at the heart of an Austen novel.

The director commentary by Rozema was most insightful because time and time again she claimed that scenes I considered suspect were taken from the novel. There is a decidedly modern sensibility to the way relationships are portrayed in this film. At various times we become convinced that Sir Thomas and Mary are both interested in Fanny in a sexual way. Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan) is constantly taking laudanum, the oldest son is a drunken sot, and the family fortune is earned by slave labor in Antigua. Most importantly, there is sex in this film, not just the prospect of romance.

Of course, the chief enjoyment of any Austen film is in rooting on our heroine, and O'Connor shines as Fanny. We suffer as we watch the facade she puts on in public, knowing we have seen the real Fanny when she reads to us what she has written, and we wait patiently for the man she loves to come to the inevitable conclusion that the intelligent and moral Fanny is the only woman at Mansfield Park worth taking as a wife. Pinter's performance as Lord Bertram is perfectly marvelous and Davidtz as the cold blooded Mary, whose solution to the climatic family crisis makes it abundantly clear she is the antithesis of Fanny, provides the other standout acting job in the film.

In the final analysis, I am content with the inventions Rozema has brought to Austen's novel. After all, these novels are no more sacred texts than the writings of any other great author that has been given the Hollywood treatment. Certainly Rozema is to be commended for the consistent vision she provides with her novel approach to adapting the novel. The integration of young Austen's early novels (juvenile efforts that were never published in her life time) fits perfectly into the film's narrative. Some Austen fans may not be pleased by these changes, but they will have to admit Rozema created them as an appreciation of the author.

Rating:
Summary: Will they EVER get this book right on film??
Review: It is really infuriating that Jane Austen's most profound book has been turned into two really frustrating movies. This most recent film version of "Mansfield Park" has Frances O'Connor playing Fanny Price as we perhaps wished Austen had presented her. She has some spirit; she's able to stand up for herself; she's much more her own person than she was portrayed in the BBC version. The only problem is, this is not Austen's Fanny Price. (Fanny was portrayed in the other extreme in the BBC version by Sylvestra LeTouzel; she was so whiny, holier-than-thou, judgemental and obnoxious in that film that we were left wondering what anyone could find attractive in this person.) Not only is O'Connor's characterization not Austen's Fanny Price, this movie is not Austen's "Mansfield Park". Patricia Rozema took some appalling liberties with Austen's book; here we have Lady Bertram as an opium addict, which is supposed to explain her perpetual indolence; Sir Thomas is Simon Legree redux, and Edmund, who at least had some personality in the BBC version, albeit a moralizing, sanctimonious snob, is little more than a cypher in this film. Austen tiptoed around the fact that the Bertram family's fortune came from the blood and toil of the slaves on the family's plantation in Antigua; Rozema shoves it right in the viewer's face. Taken on its own, the film is a fairly enjoyable period piece, and Frances O'Connor is a winning heroine; but no way in the world does this movie deserve the title of "Mansfield Park".

Rating:
Summary: A delightful and wickedly fun period piece
Review: As a woman who loves Jane Austen films, I knew I was going to like this film. But I was wrong. I loved it and would definately put it at the top of the best Austen adaptations. I use the term adaptation loosely since the film isn't exactly the same as the novel. It's better to think that the film used the Austen novel as a springboard. The story itself involves Fanny Price who goes to live at her rich relative's home at a young age. She becomes close with their son Edmund Bertram, and eventually grows to love him. But the arrival of the Crawford family seems to have made quite a mess of it. Edmund begins courting Mary Crawford, the older, worldly sister. Her brother Henry is attracted to the engaged Mariah Bertram, but eventually falls in love with Fanny. However, Fanny does not trust him and still longs for Edmund to return her love. It sounds like a soap opera but rises above this level because of it's wit and tantalizing characters. Frances O'Connor ('A.I.') and Jonny Lee Miller ('Trainspotting', very handsome) as Fanny and Edmund, share a boiling chemistry. Embeth Davidtz as Mary plays the part with obvious joy and zest. Alessandra Nivola as Henry also has the perfect mix of charm and danger about him. The direction is also marvelous with great period touches. The gorgeous English countryside becomes another character. Overall, it's not a great adaptation, but if you're like me and love period romance films, especially those with wit and charm, then see it, definately.

Rating:
Summary: Another tangle of tortured, amorous yearnings
Review: MANSFIELD PARK is the third film adaptation, after PRIDE & PREJUDICE and SENSE & SENSIBILITY, of a Jane Austen novel that I've been entreated to see by female acquaintances. Perhaps they're trying to refine my boorish character. Actually, while I've not read any of the Austen novels (nor do I intend to), I've enjoyed all three screen versions. There's hope for me yet, even at this late date.

This time around, our plucky heroine is Fannie Price, who, at the film's beginning at age 10, is sent by her parents from their flea-infested quayside hovel in Portsmouth to live with a pair of maternal aunts, Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan) and Mrs. Norris (Sheila Gish), at MANSFIELD PARK. Lady Bertram is married to the lord of the manor, Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter), and Mrs. Norris seems to be an integral part of Housekeeping. Fannie is to "better herself" among the family at the Great House, which includes Bertram's sons, Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller) and Tom (James Purefoy) and daughters, Julia (Victoria Hamilton) and Maria (Justine Waddell). Very soon the script jumps forward several years to 1806, and Fannie is now a young woman (played by Frances O'Conner). By this time also, Maria is engaged to a dull but congenial local chap, Mr. Rushworth (Hugh Bonneville).

Fannie is pretty much unimpressed by her residence among the landed gentry, and her wit, which she sometimes addresses to the camera (a nice touch to the film), is sharp. As she says of living at MANSFIELD PARK, "Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." One day, these "busy nothings" turn steamier with the arrival of the Crawfords, a brother/sister act, Henry (Alessandro Nivola) and Mary (Embeth Davidtz), who are there to rent out a nearby cottage. The film's best scene is perhaps when the Crawfords are ushered into the parlor where Fannie and the Bertrams are gathered while Sir Thomas and Tom, Jr. are off on a jolly inspecting the family's plantation in Antigua. One could hear a pin drop as the lens focuses on the faces of Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, Julia and Maria as their eyes fasten on the Gorgeous Hunk Henry, and on Mary's as she scrutinizes young Edmund. The look each demonstrates is the same I might show when stumbling across an especially fine piece of steak at the meat counter. Very soon, emotions run high. Maria has the hots for Henry, but he's obsessed with Fannie, who continues in her long standing love of Edmund, who may or may not return the feeling but is momentarily distracted by the admiring flirtations of the alluring Mary. It's the usual Austen Regency soap opera with its attendant crises d'amour.

For me, the considerable appeal of MANSFIELD PARK lies somewhere between that of P&P and S&S, the former having the highest (because of a greater length that allowed for varied and fuller character development). The vulnerable yet strong-willed Price is wonderfully likable, especially when she (both as the 10-year old and the young adult) delivers her asides to the viewing audience with wry humor and a mischievous smile. And, unlike the other two Austen epics mentioned, MANSFIELD PARK has a truly sharp edge revolving around the enslaved Blacks on the Bertrams' Antiguan property. Fannie is cut by this one day when she discovers some eye-opening sketches made by the younger Tom of events back on the plantation. No scene of such intensity was ever part of the cinematic P&P or S&S, and it's startling because it's so unexpected. It's an effective counterpoint to the gentility of Fannie's present environment.

If I have it right, there are one or two more Austen novels on film, plus at least one by Charlotte Brontë, that I'm being pressured to view. How much does a Neanderthal have to endure to evolve into a New Age Sensitive Fella?

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Movie!
Review: First off let me say, anyone who has ever read a book then seen the movie adaptation will know that rarely are movies ever faithful to the book, but that aside, this is an EXCELLENT, thoroughly enjoyable movie throughout. I have watched it several times, and I never tire of it. Even though I know the ending, I still find myself waiting in suspense.
I love period movies, and this one is wonderful, full of subtilities and things implied but not necessarily spoken, much like it would have been in the "proper" times it is set. Even after many viewings I still find I pick up on things I missed before.
Don't buy it if you are looking for faithful representation of the book but please DO buy it if you are looking for a story you will enjoy over and over and be glad you added it to your collection!