April 4 movie: Pride and Prejudice. Disc 2 of the Elizabeth Garvie miniseries confirms my previous opinion: there's much to recommend this version but if I had to choose just one, I'd choose the 1995 Jennifer Ehle version. David Rintoul (Dr. Darcy in the earlier miniseries) isn't as expressive as Colin Firth. One might even call him wooden.
On the other hand, I did very much like Lady Catherine and Miss de Bourgh. Miss de Bourgh's performance was much more sympathetic than in the 1995 version, and I found myself feeling sorry for her. I think that's true to the text; Miss de Bourgh never does anything hurtful to anyone that I can recall. You can think of her as being trapped by circumstance and doomed by her mother to an unhappy life (although Elizabeth never feels any sympathy for her, I do). Then again, you could say that she never does anything bad because she never does anything at all. It's to the credit of the actress playing Miss de Bourgh that she could elicit my sympthy in a character with no lines.
Another nice thing about this version is that they spend more time in the sort of epilogue, the bit at the end where Darcy and Elizabeth explain everything that went before to each other. From a narrative point of view, I think the more recent script was right to cut this. But I love the characters and it's nice to spend a little more time with them at the end.
Post a comment