Significant Departure from Canon, Jan 30 2003

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.

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