Drawing on Jane Austen's life, letters, journals, and maybe even mystique in addition to the novel itself, writer-director Patricia Rozema projects the author onto the heroine to a degree that no novelist worth her salt would abide. (And Austen was a novelist worth her salt and her pepper, too.) The upshot is that Fanny Price receives a transfusion of social awareness and free-spiritedness ("Fanny Price! Will you please try to act with some decorum?"), not to mention literary ambition and all-around moxie, such that a present-day feminist might overcome the long-standing reservations about the character -- her primness, her meekness, her submissiveness, her self-pity -- and "identify" with her more fully. Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night Is Falling), apart from projecting Austen onto the character, could be suspected of projecting herself as well. Yet, for all the filmmaker's modernness in attitude and boldness in its expression, she yields nothing to the original Fanny, the Fanny on the page, in pious judgmentalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her exposé of Sir Thomas's involvement in the West Indies slave trade, and her acknowledgment of Fanny's forward-looking PC view of it. The benevolent patriarch is thus transmogrified into a figure of irremediable repulsiveness and hypocrisy. (Which, incidentally, spoils an otherwise enjoyable performance from playwright Harold Pinter, a commanding presence, a fine speaker, an understated actor. ) The novel, in common with other Austens, is in essence a fairy tale, in specific a Cinderella story, and there can be no place in it for Uncle Tom's Cabin. The same could be said for the gross carnality with which the marital indiscretion of Mrs. Rushworth is depicted, when Fanny barges through a bedroom door and finds herself, as it were, momentarily in an illustrated edition of Tom Jones. The delicate balance of Austen's make-believe universe again gets hit with a sandbag. One wonders why Rozema thought she wanted to take on Austen in the first place. To improve her? To educate her? To convert her? Frances O'Connor, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola, Embeth Davidtz. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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