Reviewing Jane: What Are Men To Rocks And Mountains?

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 2005
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Rosamund Pike
Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

Pride and Prejudice is, without a doubt, the cornerstone of Jane Austen's brief but powerful writing career. Almost inevitably the biggest hit from an artist is never actually their best work, but while I haven't finished my readings yet (Emma and Persuasion, here we come!), I feel confident enough to say that the people aren't exactly wrong. There are other books I have enjoyed just as much, but there's no denying the magnetic pull of the Bennett family and their exploits.

The novel's fame has led to no dearth of adaptations, so prepare to spend a lot of time in Darcy territory. But there's no better place to start than the definitive film version of the story, the 2005 Keira Knightley vehicle from a pre-Atonement Joe Wright. The Colin Firth miniseries is generally hailed as the magnum Austen opus (more on that later), but this ain't no TV blog, is it?

Movies rule! Suck it!

I'm pretty sure the basic plot of Pride and Prejudice courses through the blood of Anglo pop culture, but how about a little refresher? Mr. and Mrs. Bennett (Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn) have five unmarried daughters to wrangle. In descending order: Jane (Rosamund Pike), the fairest, who lacks the ability to find a single fault in another human being; Lizzy (Keira Knightley), a clever and sarcastic girl who doesn't take life and love too seriously; Mary (Talulah Riley), the plainest daughter who thus feels the need to be smarter than everyone else; Kitty (Carey Mulligan, who we've already crossed paths with in Northanger Abbey), a giggly flirt; and Lydia (Jena Malone), the giggliest and flirtiest of them all.

When the wealthy twink Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) arrives in town, he immediately falls for Jane. The friend he has dragged with him, the taciturn Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), falls less immediately in love with Lizzy, upon whom he makes a terrible impression with his prideful disdain of her looks and her family. Thus begins a genteel comedy of errors where these two crazy kids just can't seem to get it together.

It doesn't help that he refuses to undo the buttons on his collar until like two hours into the movie.

The thing they don't tell you in high school is how hilarious Jane Austen's work is. They think that for a work of literature to be important, it has to be serious, but that chokes out everything that's most elegant and essential to the woman's work, which was a delicate satire of human behavior that is so universal that it rings true even outside the context of the prim, unrecognizable society of Regency England. Thankfully, Pride and Prejudice does not commit the sin of ignoring that humor.

I wouldn't be so insane as to call this film a comedy, but the actors and screenwriter really do capture the jovial, winking quality of the narrative that pulses beneath the romantic drama. The awkward fumbling of feelings that can sometimes feel dry on the page comes to savage, remarkable life here from top to bottom.

First in line to be commended should be Simon Woods, whose Bingley is a stammering, gleeful idiot that captures the heart immediately. But let us not forget Tom Hollander as the obsequious, oblivious Mr. Collins, a role he imbues with a constantly jarring intensity. But hey, there are leads in this movie, and I'm busy complimenting the supporting roles, as I am generally wont to do. Let me just say this: There is a reason Knightley is the definitive Lizzy Bennett and Macfadyen is not the definitive Darcy. I'm not knocking him (a scene where he can't figure out whether to sit or stand alone earns him my esteem), but Knightley floats across the top of this movie like an angel, delivering her dialogue with grace and wit that perfectly represents the way that every teen girl views themselves.

That said, I could do without QUITE as much brown in her wardrobe, but what are you gonna do?

Although Joe Wright obviously has spent a lot of time bringing these characters to life, he also cares about much more than merely delivering Jane's reliable ol' dialogue to audiences for the umpteenth time. He wants to craft a piece of cinema and while sometimes that eagerness spills over into bizarre excess like the rapid zoom that highlights an awkward moment in the Pemberley household, his vision is generally lush and stunning.

If Pride and Prejudice was just landscape and manor home photography without a single living creature in sight, it would be a pretty great movie. The dewy, romantic glow of England has never been more palpable. But there are people in this movie, and he shoots them so well! His Steadicam never fails to rove across the bustling halls of whatever estate our characters are occupying at the moment, sending viewers deep into his vision of the period with long, uninterrupted takes of life being lived. He also makes certain bold choices that burn themselves into the memory, most effectively a dance sequence that busts realism wide open to isolate Lizzy and Darcy and their sudden, yearning connection.

In short, Pride and Prejudice is a beautiful work of cinema, a lovingly thorough work of adaptation (he restages several scenes from the novel and truncates others, but the full breadth of the story and its emotional impact are entirely present), and a vivid resurrection of Austen's trademark humor that never for one second feels stuffy or dry. Really the only reason I'm marking the movie a little lower than this review would lead you to believe is the fact that I hated Darcy's hair, and couldn't convince myself that Lizzy would find him attractive during the first half of the movie.

Come on, this is a romantic comedy. We can afford to be a little petty with our lovers. It's still a good movie, leave me alone.

TL;DR: Pride and Prejudice is a valuable cinematic interpretation of one of literature's most deservedly enduring novels.
Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1055
Other Films Based on Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (Leonard, 1940)

Pride and Prejudice (miniseries - Langton, 1995)
Bridget Jones's Diary (Maguire, 2001)
Pride & Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (Black, 2003)
Bride & Prejudice (Chadha, 2004)
Pride and Prejudice (Wright, 2005)
Unleashing Mr. Darcy (Winning, 2016)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers, 2016)
Before the Fall (Geisler, 2016)
Marrying Mr. Darcy (Monroe, 2018)
Christmas at Pemberley Manor (Theys, 2018)

Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe (McBrearty, 2018)

Pride & Prejudice: Atlanta (Baraka, 2019)

Reviewing Jane: Now I Must Give One Smirk, And Then We May Be Rational Again

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 2007

Director: Jon Jones

Cast: Felicity Jones, JJ Feild, Carey Mulligan

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey is defined by a certain lack of plot and a coterie of hilariously biting, satirical characters, so it's probably the most likely entry to be adapted into a film that exactly fits my tastes. There's nothing I love more than a brisk, character-driven movie. But unfortunately, Northanger Abbey is perhaps the least known and least respected of her six novels, so it was never going to get the grandiose big-budget treatment of a Pride and Prejudice (take your pick which one I'm talking about).

It's just one of the endless pitfalls of having good taste.

In Northanger Abbey (the 2007 Masterpiece production, and boy oh boy is it going to be important to specify which one we're talking about as we get deeper into this marathon - there's literally two iterations of Emma from the exact same year), Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) is a young teen from a family of ten. She's invited on a trip to the town of Bath with some family friends, and she doesn't hesitate at her chance to get out and see the wider world, which she's only read about in books.

Unfortunately, her perceptions of the world and the people in it are entirely based on the plots of the Gothic romance novels she devours, so she has herself a bit of a vivid imagination that hasn't exactly prepared her for the mundane realities and pettiness of the people she meets there. Although she falls in love immediately with the handsome gentleman Henry Tilney (JJ Feild, who we just saw playing a Darcy analogue in Austenland), she encounters certain obstacles in the form of the lecherous boor John Thorpe (William Beck), who fancies himself in love with her; his sister Isabella (Carey Mulligan, who we will see playing one of the assorted sisters in Pride and Prejudice - get ready for a bunch of overlaps, because the British do not skimp on their Austen adaptations), a false-faced dilettante who fancies herself in love with Catherine's brother James (Hugh O'Connor), until somebody better comes along; and Tilney's father (Liam Cunningham), a dictatorial tyrant with a nasty temper.

She is also exposed to a great number of terrible hats, such is the danger of the outside world.

Northanger Abbey is very clearly a low budget affair, but the good thing about shooting in England is that the whole country is basically a period piece, so it doesn't weigh on your wallet to find some grand crumbling castle or other to shoot in. So the locations at least provide a level of production quality that isn't reflected in, say, the lighting. 

But one odd choice that makes itself immediately known is the way that Northanger Abbey sexes up the original storyline. This only rears its ugly head in a few cases - most notably in a dalliance between Carey Mulligan and someone who is patently not her fiancé, but also in some truly disgusting extras work that includes the line "she's a ripe peach ready for the plucking" - but it's a jarring decision that adds nothing to the work and doesn't commit hard enough to feel like anything more than lascivious window dressing. It's a horny movie, but it's still a Masterpiece Theatre production, so there's a very low ceiling for what is permitted here. It feels slightly at war with its own impulses, which I guess makes it in and of itself a perfect Jane Austen character, but definitely not a satisfyingly consistent narrative.

You can't just show SHOULDERS and expect to get away with it, Masterpiece!

Also there's no getting around the score, which is just tragically miscalculated. It's like the Harry Potter theme got co-opted by a Steamboat Willie short, and it cartoonishly underscores every minuscule movement onscreen. If it turns out it's not royalty-free library music, I'd definitely start to worry about the sanity of whoever composed it, because they clearly fundamentally misunderstand the tone of Jane Austen, and possibly humanity as a whole.

But hey, we can forgive a movie its budget if it's engaging, and Northanger Abbey is... well, it tries. The most important visual element introduced into the story is frequent Scrubs-esque cutaways to Catherine Morland's imagination of what any particular moment will be like. She recasts the important figures in her life into a grand Gothic soap opera that is tremendously fun to watch, and really highlights the character perhaps even more than the book manages to. Unfortunately, this element is dropped exactly where it is needed most - when Catherine's explorations of the titular home of the Tilneys lead her to some very dangerous, incorrect assumptions about the Northanger patriarch.

The plot of the third act suffers mightily from a lack of these fantasies, telling rather than showing the entire conflict that drives the climax. You need to have read the book to get even a drop of tension out of the plot at this point, and if your movie's success relies on a viewer having read the least well-known Austen novel, that is a gargantuan failure.

JJ Feild's face isn't a failure though, so that helps smooth things over.

But Northanger Abbey isn't all bad. The pacing is fleet-footed, zipping past so quickly, you couldn't possibly be bored. And while nearly the entire ensemble gives the kind of flat, utilitarian performance you'd expect from a Masterpiece production, the three leads all provide something exciting to watch.

Felicity Jones, on the one hand, is kind of awe-inspiringly terrible, and that's not nothing. She has a rough-hewn movie star charisma that you can't help but watch, even as she indulges in a routine of indicative gawping every chance she gets. It's like she's trying to be a mime or something, and it's fascinating, but you can see the potential for her to become to blandly functional leading actress we know her as today.

Acting circles around her are the real reasons to watch the movie: Feild and especially Mulligan. Feild's Tilney is rakish and charming without seeming too much like a romantic cypher, and he and Jones have a genuine chemistry. But enough about men. This is a Jane Austen novel, and Carey Mulligan is pulling out all the stops here, burying her character's hopeless self-absorption in a series of fluttery little genteel movements that are just aching to be watched rapturously by any fan of a good diva.

All in all, Northanger Abbey is a reasonably satisfying first venture into the world of Austen, if not particularly inspiring. There are going to be a lot of future movie stars lurking about these here parts, and that excites me, but turning her most shallow novel into an even more shallow movie doesn't exactly lend me toward recommending it.

TL;DR: Northanger Abbey is an unimpressive low budget TV movie with some surprisingly high wattage stars.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1189
Other Films Based on Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey (Foster, 1987)
Ruby in Paradise (Nunez, 1993)
Northanger Abbey (Jones, 2007)

Silent But Deadly

Year: 2011

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm a terrible film major. I spent so much of my time watching ancient VHS detritus like Sorority House Massacre II or Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! that I'm frequently out of the loop when it comes to truly "important" cinema, like Birdman, Kill Bill, Moonrise Kingdom, or anything that the medium-strength pretentious people around me like to talk about. As a TA, I've graded so many film essays about classics that I've never given proper attention to, so I decided to take a leap with a freshman favorite: Drive*.

Well, Sergio decided for me. But regardless, it happened.

*Other perennial classics with the youngsters include Fight Club, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, and - inexplicably - The Silver Linings Playbook.

I can't really complain, considering that the 80's, Ryan Gosling, and bright colors are three of my favorite things.

Drive tells the story of an unnamed man (Ryan Gosling) who works as a stunt driver in Hollywood and moonlights as a getaway driver. He's a laconic, stylish, mostly emotionless individual who begins to open up once he connects with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos). After Benicio's father gets out of jail, the Driver finds himself drawn by his affection for Irene and his unsavory job into the seedy underbelly of LA. As he finds himself deeper and deeper in the criminal underworld, he works with his boss/confidant Shannon (Brian Cranston) to attempt to sever ties with Jewish mobster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his shady partner Nino (Ron Perlman).

As things go from bad to worse, the driver must steel himself for his story's inevitable violent conclusion.

It's like the crime-thriller version of whenever I write about Glee on The Backlot.

Everything about Drive is stripped-down and simple, but relentlessly cool and propulsive, like a race car engine. I think. Maybe. This isn't a car blog, alright? This concept, reflected in every aspect of the filmmaking, finds its greatest home in the soundtrack. The Driver's nighttime world of neon and glowing traffic lights is imbued with ambient mystery by sturdy 80's-inspired synth tracks.

Obviously that kind of thing appeals to me, considering that about 60 percent of my iTunes catalogue is composed of songs so synth-fueled, they would give Simon Le Bon a headache. But Drive's soundtrack choices are just plain cool. The tracks refrain from excess, merely providing a slick, evocative soundscape for the stylized world of the film.

Style. That's the word I keep coming back to and for good reason. Style is driving force of the film (so to speak), liberally applied by the guiding hand of director Nicolas Winding Refn. Though the Danish filmmaker may personally stray into hyperbolic pretention more often than not, his hold over the slippery craft of filmmaking remains firm and assured.

The style is so heightened and superb that, when the going gets gory (and it does, in spades), squeamish viewers will be able to stomach even the worst the film has to offer thanks to the film's carefully crafted division from reality. Though it takes care not to divorce itself so much from the real world that those moments aren't still brutal and repugnant. Thanks, Drive.

So. Style. Slow motion, symmetry, reflection, and color are Refn's tools, and Drive is his sandbox. He arranges and rearranges these elements until they form a perfect, smooth aesthetic that allows the story to course through its veins like a shot of nitro (Is that a car thing? My only experience with racing is Mario Kart.). 

My humblest apologies to Mssrs. Gosling and LoveBug.

On top of is pristine style, Drive has a screenplay that might just be the most mechanically precise work ever created from the human imagination. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that it wasn't written by a terrifying supercomputer. 

Every single aspect of the film's mise-en-scène supports its central throughline. Whether it's cheers from a radio sports game underscoring a successful getaway attempt, a red light stopping the car at precise emotional beats, an elevator door emphasizing a schism in a relationship, or a kid's cartoon perfectly summarizing the film's theme, Drive's screenplay works like Swiss clockwork. 

Drawing elements from Aesopian fable, Greek drama, and classic American thriller screenwriting, Drive is basically the perfect machine. This effect comes at the expense of some of the film's humanity, but on that front, the film has a secret weapon: Mr. Ryan Gosling.

Although his character practically has fewer lines of dialogue than Jason Voorhees, Gosling imbues him with a strong personality and moral structure, buried deep beneath his calm exterior, like whale song beneath the calm moonlit ocean.

He inspires the poetic side of me, what can I say?

The entire film is filtered through his character, to the point that many key events in scenes are kept largely offscreen, so we can watch his responses to things rather than the things themselves. That might sound counterintuitive, but the man's eyes are so damn expressive that you can feel every blow, every mote of drama that the world has to offer all through his microscopic reactions. The theater kid inside of me wants to knock his block off in a jealous tantrum.

What's even more impressive is that this performance could have been a total wash. In the hands of any other actor, the empty role would just have been filled with a pretty face and a broad shoulder and been completely efficient. But Gosling elevates the character above his material, even if he could have just coasted through on the fact that the first act is essentially just Ryan Gosling uniform porn. I swear, they put him in just about every single fetishized outfit that Tumblr bloggers can imagine. Check it:

Ryan Gosling as Vic Victor, the hard-nosed vigilante cop with a big appetite.

Ryan Gosling as Edge Streetly, the hunky yet humble mechanic.

Ryan Gosling as... OK, no theory is perfect.

It'd be so easy to let that perfectly symmetrical mug control his performance, but Gosling just goes ahead and owns the screen anyway. Something must be said for the other performers, of whom Carey Mulligan is a clear stand-out in a refreshingly un-idealized role, but Gosling's performance overpowers the ample talents of his co-stars, dulling them with his supernova brightness. His screen presence is so riveting that he sucks some of the emulsion right off the negative.

There's some film student humor for ya. Hey, at least I'm getting something out of my final semester in the academic sphere.

Anyway, my only real qualms with the film revolve around its central simplicity. Its aims and its means tend to be straightforward, but some second act wrinkles breach the straightforward nature of the film, introducing a few too many characters, motivations, and extraneous plot points into its Spartan storyline.

Beyond that? Nothing. Drive is a terrific watch, full of handsome men doing terrible things to terrible men and discovering what it means to be a real human being (or, if you listen to the film's most played song, a "real human bean."). And that's nothing to shake a stick shift at.

TL;DR: Drive is a Swiss watch mechanical thriller with a neon, 80's-infused aesthetic.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1229

Too Cool For School

Year: 2009

Director: Lone Scherfig

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Guess who has tildes on his keyboard and hasn't seen nearly enough Best Picture nominees? ~This guy~ Luckily, this guy also has a Sergio around to make sure he receives culture beyond the mildewy smear of 80's fashion that the slasher genre provides. Our most recent adventure into the fields of high(er) art is 2009's An Education, which has proven to be a pretty good stepping stone, what with its zero dismemberments and thoroughly unambitious visual schema.

It's a little bit comforting to learn that award-winning films can have aesthetics just as fundamentally bare bones as some upper-grade slashers. Although the content is certainly more flashy and artistic, An Education has no ambition to challenge the preset notions of what cinema is and can be aside from being generally pretty.

It is rarely actively bad, although there is some editing that strains to keep characters isolated from one another, distracting me immensely from the drama at hand. Also there's some awful YA garbage voiceover that just doesn't belong in a film like this. But that's about it.

In other news, Carey Mulligan will be young forever.

An Education regales us with the story of Jenny Mellor (Carey Mulligan), an idealistic (read: irritating hipster) British schoolgirl in Twickenham in 1961. As the town's name might suggest, it's not the sort of place you want to spend your entire life, especially if you're the creative type. Jenny is pushed by her overbearing and hyper-conservative father (Alfred Molina who has basically never played a non-puppy-crushing character in his entire career) toward cello recitals and applying to Oxford. But when she meets a charming and debonair older man named David (Peter Sarsgaard), he whisks her away into a life of high culture and pretentious bons mots.

As the story develops, it is revealed that David might not be exactly who he seems to be. This should be good news, considering that he seems to be a lecherous predator inappropriately lusting after a minor, but unfortunately things get even worse. It wouldn't be An Education if there wasn't an ironically terrible life lesson to be learned.

Like DON'T GET INTO STRANGERS' CARS! Also you're getting in on the wrong side. Damn Brits.

The plot is genuinely quite engaging, so the simple aesthetic isn't necessarily a negative, just a missed opportunity. Although the context of the time period is only used sparingly, there is a strong undercurrent of just how limited the options for young women in the 60's tended to be. When faced with either becoming a secretary, a schoolmarm, or a wife to a rich husband, it's easier to be fooled by someone who is the first person to insist you have taste and show you a glimpse of a life outside your parents' home.

Jenny is drawn to this image of a better life, but she has been so sheltered from the world that she doesn't understand that everything has drawbacks. Every young dreamer wants to go to Paris and watch movies and eat bread and dole out a couple forced showers, but they just can't understand all the bad in the world and Jenny is oh, so stupid.

The drama is tense and exciting at times, but my biggest qualm with the film is that it takes Jenny's side far too freely and willingly. For a great bulk of An Education, a man preying on a juvenile girl is treated with sumptuous respect as a grand love story for the ages. I can appreciate that as a decent try at expressionism, but it's far too off-putting and disagreeable to really become a solid spine for the film.

How romantic! They're running in the rain! I bet his intentions are pure and wholesome!

For what it's worth, the performances at the center of An Education are terrific, especially Carey Mulligan in her breakout starring role, bringing a youthful vibrance and authentic innocence that magnetizes viewers in spite of the character's insipidity. Second best in show would have to be Rosamund Pike in a pre-Gone Girl supporting role, who effortlessly embodies the spirit of Nick Hornby's dry wit.

Overall, thanks to its writing and performers, An Education is a light treat for fans of Oscarbait who want to engage with a story rather than being visually challenged. So basically, it's a great film for people who are tired of the pretention of the whole ceremony, and I'm not about to complain about that. It's just a little too loopy about its subject matter for me to wholeheartedly praise it as a solid unit.

TL;DR: An Education is an engaging tale built upon a strangely atonal foundation with a minimum of aesthetic ambition.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 805