Pride & Prejudice

Joe Wright stages the Bennet house as a working farm, not a drawing room: vegetation over the brickwork, livestock at the edges of shots, conversations running over each other. That last is a written rule: Wright reasoned that in large families of girls everyone talks over everyone. The camera follows suit, dollying through the crowd at the Netherfield ball in long unbroken takes while figures major and anonymous drift through frame. The second choice is compression. The weight letters carry on the page is handed to glances, the Wickham strand is thinned to nothing, subplots are cut. For a reader wanting detail that is a loss; for a newcomer it is what keeps the film moving. Two things are worth knowing. The North American release carries a closing scene not in the novel, the married Darcys at Pemberley; the British version ends on Mr Bennet giving his blessing. And the period was pushed back to the late eighteenth century, partly for the fear the French Revolution spread through the aristocracy, partly because Wright disliked the empire waistline. All eleven weeks were shot on real locations; the only built set was a dance floor in a potato warehouse. Good if you want the ball as one continuous movement. Not for a reader who expects Austen’s dialogue delivered intact.