All Things Pride and Prejudice

   2005 saw the release of a new Pride and Prejudice film, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Mathew Macfadyen. It was the first film adaptation since the old black and white film with Lawrence Olivie; all the adaptations that had come out in the intervening years had been for TV.

   Films are different from TV series in that they have more time constraints, usually a film director has two or three hours at the most at their disposal. Such time constraints inevitably translate into cuts. Some scenes have to be made shorter, some have to be left out completely. More often than not the depth and complexity of characters have to be sacrificed as well and when you're dealing with a book whose characters are as deep and complex as those in P&P, that means there's a lot of sacrificing to do.
  But, as the saying goes are cons are but extensions of our pros, so let's look at the pros first.
  The film is very beautifully made, some of the frames are so good, I bet if they were made into pictures and hung in galleries they could sell for fortunes. The soundtrack is superb and the acting is very good too. Keira Knightley is very convincing and while the material she has to play may not be the best (more on this later), she definitely does the best with what she has. All in all if considered in separation from the book it's based on, the 2005 P and P is a very decent motion picture and very modern too.
  It's when you compare it with the book it's based on that its faults stand out. As has been noted above, cuts and omissions are inevitable when you have to cram 400+ pages into two hours of screen time and yet one just can't help feeling disappointed when so little is revealed even about the main characters that they come across is somewhat cardboard. After watching the film the only reliable conclusion one can draw about Keira Knightley's Liz is that she enjoys making fun of and laughing at other people. Naturally there's quite a bit more than that to the Liz we find in the book. Then there's Darcey; a very multi-faceted and complex character has been reduced to the level of a complete moron barely able to speak. And this is probably my main beef with this adaptation, when supporting characters get glossed over or completely left out in a film adaptation, that's to be expected, but when the same sort of thing is done to the main characters, that's taking it a bit too far in my opinion.
 There are also other things, such as the house the Bennets live in; in the movie it's rather derelict, as if the Bennets were not simply short on money but downright destitute. In one memorable scene a pig walks through the house; the courtyard looks like a pigsty with sundry domestic animals all over the place. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like a rather big error on the side of poverty when you compare it to the descriptions in the book.
   So my verdict is as follows, if I were giving stars to this movie I'd probably give it three out of five. It has its good points and someone who's never actually read the book but only heard about it may even enjoy it. Probably even if you've read the book you may still enjoy watching this film if you get a kick out of visually striking scenes as long as you don't expect the same profoundness and complexity of characters as in the book, because you won't find much of that in this film.