Reviewing Jane: Every Moment Has Its Pleasures And Its Hope

Year: 2007

Director: Iain B. MacDonald

Cast: Billie Piper, Blake Ritson, Hayley Atwell

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

Mansfield Park is my least favorite Jane Austen novel because it has the least dynamic heroine and the most outdate social mores (the drama of an entire colume hinges on the performance of a mildly licentious play), so I can't say I was particularly excited to sit through my second helping after the supremely boring 1999 adaptation. And seeing how the TV adaptations (usually for BBC or Masterpiece or both) as a rule tend to be worse than the theatrical efforts, so how could this have possibly gone right?

Well, casting someone I'm aware of certainly helps. Hey, it's that lady from the one season of Doctor Who that I watched!

In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price (Billie Piper) is a poor young woman who has been raised in the titular country mansion with her rich relatives the Bertrams. Over the course of the past eight years or so she has fallen helplessly in love with her cousin Edmund (Blake Ritson), and we're actually meant to root for them to end up together, so that's another fun thing about 1800's literature. The Bertams' lives are turned upside down with the arrival of siblings Henry (Joseph Beattie) and Mary Crawford (Hayley Atwell), a lothario and a gold digger respectively.

While the Bertram sisters Maria (Michelle Ryan) and Julia (Catherine Steadman) battle it out over Henry despite Maria already being engaged, Edmund seems to be falling for Mary, much to Fanny's chagrin. She spends the entire summer being constantly reminded of her low place in the social hierarchy, subject to the ever-changing whims and vices of the rich folks around her.

And those vices include more than just saucy plays, let me tell you what.

So given everything Mansfield Park had going against it, imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the most entertaining iteration of the story, including the novel itself. I wouldn't dare to suggest it was better than the Austen text, but it's certainly more popcorny and delightful. Everything in the movie is something that can be found in the novel, so it's not exactly reinventing the wheel, but it arranges those elements in a way that's immensely satisfying. It draws out the emotional and humorous flavors of the story while cutting away all the fat that makes the book a bit of a dry read. 

They do fiddle with the character of Fanny a bit (which is necessary to sell her to a modern audience), giving her a bit more inner fire and rebelliousness that makes certain scenes gel poorly, but let's face facts that it would be extremely boring to watch her sit in corners and patiently observe the other characters like she does in the novel. And I adore that the film's approach seems to be "what I did over my horny summer vacation" (the eye fucking in this movie, and at one point thumb-touch fucking, is off the charts).

Also, apropos of nothing, no Jane Austen leading man has had more Hot Topic-looking bangs, thank you 2007.

The clarity of the narrative also allowed me to emotionally invest in the characters in a way I never had before, even if the performances aren't necessarily something to write home about. Hayley Atwell provides a terrific, snippy antagonist and Billie Piper is game for the material, even if she does seem constantly on the verge of tears. But aside from them, nobody rises above or sinks below "adequate," though Joseph Beattie could have helped make some of his scenes a little less muddled if he leaned more into mustache-twirling villainy.

And I should hope by now that I've explained my theory about the importance of the dance scenes to any Jane Austen adaptation. Mansfield Park's ball is no exception. Their line dancing is sometimes stilted and occasionally makes them look downright maniacal, but the filmmakers take advantage of the whirl of motion to catch us up on the dynamics between the characters, with Fanny coming in between but failing to divert the connection between Mary and Edmund. There's also an excellent closing dance at Fanny's wedding that visually highlights the way she finally feels like she belongs to the world of the Bertram rather than merely observing it from the sidelines unable to truly take part in it. 

I still hold out hope that the same year's Persuasion starring Sally Hawkins will be my favorite of the TV adaptations because it stars Sally Hawkins who I love, but I certainly can't complain about the effervescent treat I was given in Mansfield Park. Much like Fanny Price herself, this outing proves that greatness truly can come from anywhere regardless of fortune (or budget).

TL;DR: Mansfield Park is a surprisingly fun romp through the hornier side of Jane Austen's novels.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 815

Other Films Based on Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999)

Mansfield Park (MacDonald, 2007)

The Devil Is In The Prequels

Year: 2004

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy 

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As we near the end of our Exorcist retrospective, we find ourselves with a franchise in a state of desolation. 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic was a napalm sandwich of suckage, and 1990’s The Exorcist III suffered at the box office, partly because Part 2 stabbed the franchise in the eye and left it to bleed out in the gutter, and partly because William Peter Blatty seized his opportunity in the director’s chair to eradicate every last element that people loved about the original film. There’s a reason it was 14 years before the franchise showed any signs of life.

The Exorcist, in its fourth entry, went where any cash-strapped series painted into a corner would go: The past. Exorcist: The Beginning took one look at the shambles that the continuity had become and retreated right into prequeldom. That way we can spend time with a character we already know and like, and we don’t have to follow around a 40-year-old Linda Blair as she tries to piece together a coherent character out of the broken splinters The Heretic left her with.

If you thought I was done bagging on that movie, you were dead wrong.

So. The year? 1949. The place? Nairobi, Africa. Father Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård), 24 years before he would join Father Karras in banishing the demon from one Regan MacNeil, has (guess what) lost his faith. Gee, where have I heard that one before? Surviving the Nazi regime took its toll on his belief, so now he’s an archaeologist skulking around in smoky bars, wearing fedoras and running away from giant boulders and stuff (presumably).

He joins the crew of a dig site that is working to unearth a strange church recently discovered buried in the desert. Unfortunately, it seems like excavating this church has unleashed an ancient evil that is attacking the camp. Little boy Joseph (Remy Sweeney) comes down with a case of the Shakes. And the Rattles. And the Blankly Watches while His Brother Is Devoured By Hyenas. On site doctor and half-baked love interest Sarah (Isabella Scorupco) tries all she can to make him well, but this problem might just need to be solved by an exorcist. Also, tensions break out between the British soldiers and the African workers, because this is a Renny Harlin movie, and if something totally random and loud doesn’t happen every fifteen minutes, he gets hives.

I mean, I guess it worked for Nightmare on Elm Street 4.

For a movie where so much happens, Exorcist: The Beginning is still bracingly boring. I guess that’s what I get for picking a prestige horror franchise this month, even if things went downhill art-wise pretty quickly after the original. There are a lot of nominally interesting or disturbing goings-on, but the movie presents them with such lackadaisical nonchalance that you almost don’t even register them passing by. I blame the editing, which is like a Bonnie Tyler music video gone mad, endlessly sideswiping its own material by cutting away to a flashback or (more likely) something entirely unrelated, cutting back, cutting away to that same thing (nearly unchanged and equally irrelevant), cutting back, and so on like the world’s slowest strobe light. Every scene is chopped into little pieces with all meaning leached out of them.

Of course, it doesn’t help that most of the actual content is a grab bag assortment of studio-mandate gross-outs that have nothing to do with each other. There’s literally a scene that repeatedly cuts to a disgusting birth sequence that takes place in an entirely different location with a character who will never be seen again. Sure, it’s shocking, but it doesn’t match the film we’re actually watching and it actively impedes the scene in progress. It feels like you’re watching this movie on TV, only instead of commercial breaks interrupting the flow, it’s excerpts from Renny Harlin’s dream journal.

Especially that shower scene.

During the infrequent moments where the film settles into a scene for more than 20 seconds, things do get a little creepy. Although most of the effects are rendered with CGI that would look bad in a Pajama Sam game, for once the film’s overdark, murky cinematography works in its favor. Several scenes set around Joseph’s hospital bed provoke genuine fear with both subtle abnormalities and outré violence, much like the original film, though obviously at a much lower quality grade. Let’s not pretend Harlin could touch Friedkin with a twenty-foot, maniac-seeking pole.

The problem is that nothing in Exorcist: The Beginning is consistent. Its subtler scares don’t fit the howlingly bad screenwriting that has Father Merrin arrive at two separates conclusions about the same topic in the span of three minutes. Its weird affection for depicting the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust (Dr. Sarah is a concentration camp survivor) doesn’t jive with the bloodthirsty willingness to slaughter Africans and British soldiers in a shoehorned-in mutiny. And its faux-psychological overtones can’t support the stunted, forgotten arc about the priest’s faith. It’s like every outfit I wore in high school. Nothing matches.

And when it finally comes down to brass tacks (i.e. an exorcism), The Beginning restages the ritual a an Indiana Jones-esque romp through underground caves that involves a lot of punching. That’s how Harlin operates: in loud, carless inanities. It’s a massively muddled film that can’t make sense of itself, at best. At worst, it’s another useless cash-in strapped onto a franchise name that had already perished in destitution some 30 years before.

TL;DR: Exorcist: The Beginning is a loud jumble with some decent scares, but it's too blunt to be effective.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 958
Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)