As if to indulge the glittering and fanciful dreams of the young, adolescent girls of the world—they’re out there, they’re hiding, they often can’t help themselves and really, I can’t see the harm in it—the long fluttering coattails of the gallant and half-savage Mr. Darcy make this man into a mythical creature. That long-drawn-out approach at dawn is so superb, so dreamlike, so perfect a romantic image that it brings the whole film to a sweetly quiescent ending. Mr. Darcy has been made by this moment, in all his rarity as the wild creature that Elizabeth has long been dreaming about; he is like a black swan scudding across the stilled surface of a lake at dawn, attentive to his own element while making for the nearby shore.
But the reason for the success of this mythical image is the same one for which I found Pride and Prejudice, taken as a whole, to be somewhat empty and sentimentalizing. While it has been infused by the glorious panoramas of the countryside, making this film a beautiful spectacle to be savored, the story overplays the romance with all this imagery that would have been better in a time-lapse documentary about the rustic life.
It is of course understandable that the director and his crew—who otherwise did a fine job—would have wanted to bring to this prestigious novel all the anticipated fireworks and the magic of the cinema to bolster a relationship that is known by Austen fans the world over. But the images were not enough, and by that final dreamlike reunion I felt that the film had hung over its characters the glittering garb that their depth and development over the course of the story hadn’t justified. It was like watching the illuminating of a cardboard palace at the first sign of nightfall: the brightness was impressive and the material, flimsy.
This is no stain on Austen’s grandeur. And how much can be expected from a two-hour spectacle that is working within time- and material-constraints that the author herself would not have envied? Literary adaptations can be done sometimes with more success, and sometimes with less. As to this one, which still hasn’t brought me to tears after days of waiting for the residue of adolescent dreams to get to me, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it at all—only that I could have enjoyed it more. But that would be something else.
