funnystrange.com

Nov. 3 movie: Mansfield Park. As a regency romance this wasn't bad, but as an Austen adaptation it was atrocious. Fanny Price is Austen's most controversial heroine because she's so ill-suited to modern sensibilities. In other words, she's a total dishrag and a lot of people can't stand her. I've developed an appreciation for Fanny, but she's still by far my least favorite Austen heroine. Anyway, it seems that the director of Mansfield Park was firmly in the "hate Fanny" camp, because the character in the movie is the polar opposite of Fanny in the book. This Fanny is proud, witty, and sure of herself. She's much more like Lizzy Bennet than like Fanny Price. In fact I think she's based on Austen herself: the movie Fanny is a writer and the passages she reads out loud all come from Austen's juvenilia.

There's also a subplot about the evils of slavery. I don't know if that's anachronistic or not; there may have been an abolitionist movement in Britain in 1806. But it is totally out of place in Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas' financial interest in slavery is only mentioned so obliquely that I didn't even realize what he was doing in Antigua the first time I read the book. There was never any opposition to it from the rest of the family, and the idea of Fanny criticizing her benefactor on moral grounds is just unreal.

There were a lot of other changes that irked me (like an on-camera sex scene), but the main problem is Fanny's character being so distorted. I guess they felt that the Fanny Price in the book was way too much of a wilting violet to make a good movie heroine. And they'd probably be right. But still, it seems like if you're going to make a movie out of a widely read book by a beloved author, you can mess around with the details but the core personalities of the main characters have to remain intact.