Jane addiction

Jane Austen (played by Anne Hathaway) with her love interest Thomas Lefroy (James McAvoy) in Becoming Jane. (Miramax/Associated Press)

From a movie studio’s point of view, this is the good news about Jane Austen films: they have a built-in audience. Here’s the bad news: that built-in audience happens to be well-read, observant and ferociously opinionated. Take Becoming Jane: As soon as the casting of The Devil Wears Prada star Anne Hathaway was announced, Janeites were protesting that she was too pretty. (Wait until they see the sex scene between Jane’s parents.)

While some Austen aficionados welcome the popularization of their favourite author, usually with the wistful hope that it might get people reading, others scrutinize every new film and television series with gimlet eyes, eager to pounce on historical anachronisms and deviations from the text. (The pigs are kept too close to the Bennets’ house. The double action harp wasn’t invented until 1810. The hero and heroine are kissing in the street!)

And soon there will be more material to pronounce upon. Not since 1995, when People magazine named her one of the year’s “25 most intriguing people,” have we had such a run on Austen and her oeuvre. Along with the new biopic (which starts August 3 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, and opens across Canada on August 10), an adaptation of the 2004 bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club hits theatres in September. Meanwhile, Masterpiece Theatre, that PBS bastion of prestige projects, plans to launch a four-month television marathon in January, 2008, with new British versions of  Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and Persuasion (all of which premiered in England last winter), and a new Sense and Sensibility. This all-Jane-all-the-time programming will also revisit the 1996 adaptation of Emma (with Kate Beckinsale) and, of course, the 1995 “Darcy in a dripping wet shirt” version of Pride and Prejudice.

According to Ruby Donner, a staunch member of the Manitoba branch of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and a former movie reviewer: “I think it’s a law in England that every ten years they have to do Pride and Prejudice.” And every time they do, filmmakers struggle with how to translate a novel to the screen. The question of what to do with Austen was brought up in the 1980s in a minor Merchant-Ivory film, Jane Austen in Manhattan. Two theatre groups, one avant-garde and the other staid and traditional, feud over the right to stage Sir Charles Grandison, a short play Austen supposedly wrote in her teens.

The debate continues. Trying to balance slavish replication (potentially stodgy) and modern relevance (potentially cheap and trivial), some filmmakers go straight-up, while others revise, relocate or reimagine Austen’s world. Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (2003) is set at a Mormon university. Bride and Prejudice (2004) moves Austen to modern-day Amritsar, where the long-suffering Mr. Bakshi faces the familiar Bollywood challenge of marrying off a handful of dowry-less daughters (including Aishwarya Rai as the most ridiculously gorgeous Austen heroine ever). The upcoming Sense & Sensibilidad plays out in a Latino community in present day L.A. There’s even a YouTube version of Pride and Prejudice enacted entirely by Barbie dolls. Like all true ladies, Jane Austen is resilient.

Austen got the Bollywood treatment when Aishwarya Rai starred in Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice. (Miramax/Alliance Atlantis)

There are some things that films can do very well, Donner suggests, like those vivid views of stately homes and lush landscapes. And of course, even the most inept screenwriter can lift some witty dialogue from the books. What’s more difficult, Donner says, is “conveying the novels’ point of view, the voice of that ironic observer.” The late novelist Carol Shields, who wrote a delicate and perceptive biography of Austen for the Penguin Lives series, calls the centre of Austen’s work a melding of “moral seriousness and comic drama.”

Bonnets and barouches don’t guarantee thematic or tonal authenticity. Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park, which has the external trappings of a period piece, is sometimes accused of tromping all over Austen in order to further its contemporary concerns, while Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, the Beverly Hills, 90210 version of Emma, is often praised for the supple grace with which it transposes the intricacies of the late 18th-century English class system to the killer cliques of an exclusive high school. The best adaptations manage to shine light on both Austen’s time and our own.

“The films tend to go for the ‘Harlequinization’ of the novels,” suggests Donner. They usually concentrate on the hero and heroine’s romance at the expense of the larger social context. The star system brings in newer, younger audiences, but it can distort Austen’s values, which tend to favour worthiness over flash. “And the movies really glamorize the men,” Donner points out, citing Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1999). “Hugh Grant plays Edward with this stuttering charm, and you just love him,” Donner says. “I mean, nobody loves him in the book.”

Bridget Jones’s Diary, which is basically Pride and Prejudice’s plot seen through seven glasses of Chardonnay and a haze of cigarette smoke, doesn’t attempt to replicate Austen’s world. Instead, it runs a parallel comic course: almost 200 years later, and Helen Fielding’s shag-happy singletons are mired in the same male-female misunderstandings and misapprehensions. The 1996 novel gives an affectionate nod to its source by having Bridget gush over the 1995 BBC series and its gloriously aloof leading man, Colin Firth, who — much to Bridget’s dismay — is having an on-set romance with co-star Jennifer Ehle. The movie (2001) takes this po-mo self-referencing to dizzying levels by casting Firth as the Darcy character. All v. confusing, as Bridget would write.

Occasionally, reworkings of Austen’s work veer from homage to hijacking. Shields argues that Austen had a vigorous sense of women’s intellectual equality, and that she often chafed at the limited sphere of an unmarried, financially dependent gentlewoman. She fought back with acute, sometimes acerbic perceptions of her world. Still, Austen’s no riot grrrl, no matter how much Canadian filmmaker Rozema wants her to be. Rozema’s 1999 Mansfield Park is the most controversial of the Austen adaptations. The novel is tricky: it was not particularly well received during Austen’s lifetime and modern readers find its strict moral structure perplexing. Rozema solves this problem by loading it up with revisionist romanticism. Drawing on Austen’s letters and her juvenilia, Rozema transforms meek Fanny Price, viewed even by devoted Janeites as a bit of a wet blanket, into a feisty, frisky feminist who likes to gallop across fields during thunderstorms.

In this hotted-up version, Fanny’s aunt, rather than being merely indolent, becomes an opium junkie, practically nodding off into the fish course, while the rather forward Mary Crawford becomes a glamorous bisexual hedonist. As one of the characters says, “This is 1806, for heaven’s sake!” — except that psychologically, it isn’t.

Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) gradually falls in love with Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen) in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (Focus Features)

Many modern directors can’t resist bringing Austen’s buried tensions to the surface, with mixed results. As Bridget Jones astutely remarks: “I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest.”

Get a roomful of Austen fans talking films and TV, and the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice usually gets good marks. As Donner points out, this is partly because its five-hour running time allows it to cover small subplots and minor characters — lose those in Austen and you lose a lot. And it’s partly because Colin Firth is so hot (and yet so cool).  Bridget once again nails it: “Jude just called and we spent twenty minutes growling, ‘Fawaw, that Mr Darcy.’ I love the way he talks, sort of as if he can’t be bothered.”

Donner also cites the 1995 version of Persuasion from director Roger Michell. Published after Austen’s death, the novel is suffused with patience, resignation, and a poignant understanding of loneliness and loss. Many Janeites commend the two leads — Amanda Root, a relative unknown, and Irish character actor Ciarán Hinds — for being kind of homely.

Homely people doing the best they can with brisk common sense, rational self-knowledge, a refusal to indulge in self-pity and a quiet but highly developed sense of irony — one can see that Jane Austen and 21st-century entertainment don’t necessarily have much in common. The film that stays truest to its source is probably the least likely to burn up the box office. The funny thing is that everyone keeps trying.

When asked for her favourite, Donner jokes, “The next one. The one that will be perfect.” In the meantime, she finds herself becoming more forgiving. Take the 2005 Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice, which she calls “a film for 12-year-old girls, really.

“Maybe that doesn’t hurt,” says Donner. “Everyone deserves their own Jane Austen.”

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.

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