Reviewing Jane: To Be Fond Of Dancing Is A Certain Step Towards Falling In Love

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: 2004

Director: Gurinder Chadha

Cast: Martin Henderson, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Nadira Babbar

Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I was a bit nervous going into Bride & Prejudice, a movie that announces its strict adherence to adapting the Jane Austen novel by only changing one letter in the title. As you may have noticed, I've sat through more than my share of Prides and Prejudices lately, and I wasn't certain I could stomach another straight adaptation right at this moment. But I do it all for you, readers who accidentally stumbled across this review while Googling pornographic videos. And I sure am glad I did. Let's get into it.

My face when pressing play.

Bride & Prejudice transplants Jane Austen's most famous love story from Regency era England to modern (read: mid-2000's) India, specifically the small town of Amritsar. Lalita Bakshi (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) is one of four sisters dominated by a mother (Nadira Babbar) who is obsessed with marrying them off. When a rich American-Indian named Balraj (Naveen Andrews) returns home for a friend's wedding, Lalita's sister Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar) falls head over heels for him.

Along for the ride is Balraj's white friend William Darcy (Martin Henderson of, weirdly, The Strangers: Prey at Night), a pompous hotel magnate who strikes up a tentative flirtation with Lalita despite his evident distaste for the non-American customs of Amritsar and the interference of hot young thang Johnny Wickham (Daniel Gillies), with whom he has a sordid past.

Very distracting interference...

I have made the point before that a Jane Austen movie is only as good as its dance scenes. Balls and dancing are integral to her work and understanding the characters and their dynamics, and any movie that gets this will rise to the top. Bride & Prejudice not only understands this, it translates it into the hypercolored musical world of Bollywood, in which music and dance are just as essential, if not more. Combining these two storytelling modes is a genius fit, and not only does it frame the Pride narrative in a unique and engaging way, it brings Western cinema the best Bollywood numbers it has ever (and probably will ever) received.

The opening dance number, which is set during a traditional Indian wedding, is a glossy spectacle that lasts for a full five minutes, effortlessly introducing you to the characters in the midst of a shimmering, jaw-dropping marathon of choreography that will leave you transfixed. No other number in the film is quite as good as this, but they all maintain its level of fizzy, summertime fun. The design of this movie is exquisite too, really indulging in the brightest fabrics and flowiest garments the nation has to offer.

The Indian setting doesn't just provide the genre, either. Chadha and her co-writer Paul Mayeda Berges utilize the culture to really dig deep and engage with Austen's narrative at its highest level, adding layers about arranged marriage and imperialism that the author wouldn't have dared to tackle so boldly in her time.

And then there's that other thing Austen would never have dared to do, which is the way Chadha wields the female gaze like a broadsword, populating the movie with scantily clad, wide-shouldered men to gaze at in awe and wonder.

As lovingly giffed by the good, thirsty folks who run the Internet.

Sure, Bride & Prejudice has its flaws. A lot of the glossier sequences get all 2004 all over the place and end up looking like the "Stars Are Blind" music video on loop. And the story really loses its dramatic thrust in the first act, its modernization of the source novel's events finally losing its grip and undercutting a key event by muddying up the character motivations and preventing the lovers' final reunion from being particularly satisfying. Even worse, this reunion is presented via the worst, most awkward middle school hug you've ever seen, lovingly plastered across the screen in sloooooow moooooootioooooon.

But who could possibly complain for long when faced with a movie this bright, funny, and thoroughly charming? Bride & Prejudice is a winning update of Jane Austen that blends witty satire with hard-hitting modern truths about culture clash and true love. And that dancing! Slumdog Millionaire might have the most widely known Bollywood number in modern memory, but Bride & Prejudice has "Jai Ho!" beat by a couple dozen country miles. It's an exquisite, uncompromising blend of cinematic traditions that has its cake and swallows it whole, too.

TL;DR: Bride & Prejudice is one page short of a full book, but it's an enormously entertaining translation of Jane Austen's most overplayed novel.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 805

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)

What Would Bryan Bertino Do?

Year: 2018

Director: Johannes Roberts

Cast: Christina Hendricks, Bailee Madison, Martin Henderson

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Honestly, the most surprising thing about The Strangers: Prey at Night is the fact that the 2008 home invasion shocker The Strangers didn't get a sequel immediately. As I pointed out in my review, it's not a movie that I love, but it wholly deserves its modern classic status and those instantly iconic villain masks should have already launched a sprawling franchise that we're just starting to get sick of by this point. But here we are. It's been 10 years, and now we're at the point where we can say, "wait, really?"

The times, how they change.

In Prey at Night (which - by the way - is a title I just can't abide. Is it a pun? On what?), a family is traveling to their uncle's secluded trailer park on the way to dropping off delinquent teen daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) at a correctional boarding school. Mother Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and father Mike (Martin Henderson) have their doubts about their decision, and brother Luke (Lewis Pullman) is just along for the ride.

As you might imagine, they never make it to that school because a trio of masked strangers descend on the park with flashing knives and an aim to wipe this family off the face of the Earth.

But not before repeating as many scenes from the original as possible.

Prey at Night is one of those "is it a sequel or is it a remake?" situations, and the answer is yes. It's a sequel to The Strangers. And it's a remake of every John Carpenter movie ever made. Director Johannes Roberts made a conscious effort to channel as much of the style and substance of 80's horror as it's possible to do in 2018 (turns out, it's very possible). Prey at Night grafts the score from The Fog onto the cinematography of Halloween onto a showdown from Christine - with some Scream and Texas Chain Saw sprinkled in for flavor. Sure, 80's pastiche in modern horror is about as uncommon as people shouting "who's there?!" but injecting it into this grim franchise is especially jarring and doubly refreshing.

You won't catch me complaining about synths being liberally slathered over a movie, and though this score (by Becoming Jane composer Adrian Johnston, for some reason) is by all accounts almost note-for-note The Fog, at least that great score is finally applied to a movie that's not boring as sin. Although, I do have my breaking point. The many 80's pop needle drops - provided by the male killer's obsessive, Baby Driver-esque need to have the radio playing while perpetrating murders - just don't do anything for me (save for one major scene involving just a splash of Bonnie Tyler, who makes any scene better).

The cinematography is also slick, fog-filled candy. It might be a little too reliant on dubiously long establishing shots and sluggish zooms, but its excellent, judicious use of swooping crane shots and dashes of neon are a starling improvement from last year's Roberts' feature 47 Meters Down, which had the most painfully ugly color scheme I'd seen in over a decade.

I could swim in the colors of this movie anytime.

Love the aesthetic of Prey at Night though I do, it's still just as flawed as the original film, in strangely similar ways considering how very different the movies are as a whole. The only true liability here is the Kiwi actor Martin Henderson, who attempts to hide his accent Walking Dead-style behind a Southern drawl that only draws more attention to how out of place he is in this cast, but oh what a liability. Any scene he shares with his son loses emotional impact by the ton, as their attempts at igniting hysteria mostly just look like they're working on their Beavis and Butthead impressions.

There's also the problem that these characters are complete, eye-gouging idiots. The decisions they make rarely resemble an action any human being has taken in recorded history, and the way they're forced through a litany of horror clichés doesn't even make them particularly interesting stupid decisions.

But Prey at Night has a secret weapon. I don't know how much weight this will carry with hardcore fans of the original film, but at the very least it's is certainly less of a dour slog. The audience I was with almost immediately got swept up in rooting for the protagonists, and there are a lot of moments that elicit cheers or groans. It's a roller coaster ride that pumps up the adrenaline more than a grim boot of misery stomping into your throat over and over again.

That's definitely more my style... But it's not really a Strangers movie, ya dig? If you loved the original, you might actually want to turn back before buying a ticket. That's probably not the sphere a sequel should exist in, but it's the truth. It's fun on its own terms, and those masks are still entirely terrifying, but they're completely different, equally fine movies.

TL;DR: The Strangers: Prey at Night is a stylistic triumph, although it's just as flawed as the original - in very similar ways, which is surprising given how different it is.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 888
Reviews In This Series
The Strangers (Bertino, 2008)
The Strangers: Prey at Night (Roberts, 2018)