Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)

Brenda Blethyn and Keira Knightley in Pride & Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet: Keira Knightley
Mr. Darcy: Matthew Macfadyen
Mrs. Bennet: Brenda Blethyn
Mr. Bennet: Donald Sutherland
Jane Bennet: Rosamund Pike
Charles Bingley: Simon Woods
Lydia Bennet: Jena Malone
Mr. Wickham: Rupert Friend
Mr. Collins: Tom Hollander
Kitty Bennet: Carey Mulligan
Lady Catherine de Bourgh: Judi Dench
Caroline Bingley: Kelly Reilly
Mary Bennet: Talulah Riley
Charlotte Lucas: Claudie Blakley
Georgiana Darcy: Tamzin Merchant
Mr. Gardiner: Peter Wight
Mrs. Gardiner: Penelope Wilton

Director: Joe Wright
Screenplay: Deborah Moggach
Based on a novel by Jane Austen
Cinematography: Roman Osin
Production design: Sarah Greenwood
Film editing: Paul Tothill
Costume design: Jacqueline Durran
Music: Dario Marianelli

Joe Wright's lush, romantic adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the ampersand belongs to the film) irked many Janeites. But people who love Austen's books are fated to be irked: There is no easy way to translate to film the narrative ironies that readers seize on with delight. Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach (with uncredited help from Emma Thompson) have crafted a Pride & Prejudice that takes place in a universe parallel to Austen's. They push back the time of the novel from the early 19th century to the late 18th. Tinkering with time is not unique to films of the novel: The 1940 version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and directed by Robert Z. Leonard moved the action up to the Victorian period, maybe to take advantage of MGM's wardrobe full of crinolines and hoop skirts. Wright's earlier time period allows  for a looser, more earthy setting, more Henry Fielding than Jane Austen. There are clotheslines and farm animals to be seen, and the first of the two balls that take place in the film is rougher, sweatier, more countrified than the elegant formal dances usually seen in period films. Elizabeth Bennet arrives at Netherfield with her hair about her ears, not neatly pinned under her bonnet. Later, she spins barefoot on a rope swing hung at the entrance to the barnyard, and at one point an enormously ungelded hog walks through the action. Even the formal dress is different: With her upswept hairdo, Judi Dench's Lady Catherine looks like she has just stepped out of a Joshua Reynolds portrait. The real strength of Wright's version is not in its fidelity to the novel, but in its creation of a satisfyingly consistent world in which it might have taken place, mutatis mutandis. There is some elegant staging: Visiting Pemberley, Elizabeth finds herself in a sculpture hall, where the nude statuary adds a frisson to her awakening attraction to Darcy. The ballroom scenes are beautifully filmed with long traveling takes among the various characters. And Dario Marianelli's score, with its suggestions of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, isn't overstated. Keira Knightley's fetching underbite  suggests Elizabeth's stubbornness and pride, and she's well-matched with Matthew Macfadyen, who has the thankless task of following in the footsteps of Olivier and Colin Firth, who became a sex symbol with his Darcy in the 1995 television series. Macfadyen is not conventionally handsome -- he's a little potato-nosed -- but that serves the character well: Darcy should not be an instant heartthrob like, for example, Mr. Wickham. There will never be a perfect film version of the novel -- for that matter, of any novel -- but Wright's Pride & Prejudice satisfies for what it is, a lesser work derived from a great source.   

Fugitive Pieces (Jeremy Podeswa, 2007)

I dislike the phrase "Holocaust film," which often gets used with a hint of condescension, suggesting that there is a genre of film that plays on our established feelings of grief and indignation about a terrible passage in history. It seems to imply that filmmakers who tell stories about the Holocaust and its effects are working with a subject that disarms criticism: that if it's about the Holocaust, a film doesn't have to worry about winning over an audience. That attitude ignores, for example, the controversy that surrounded Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), which was both celebrated and condemned. The enormity of the Holocaust tends to overwhelm conventional cinematic narrative, so that the best films in which it forms the background are those that focus on the experiences of actual people like Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002), or thinly fictionalized accounts drawn from personal experience, like Louis Malle's in Au Revoir les Enfants (1987). Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces, adapted by the director from a novel by Anne Michaels, is one of those films that are almost swamped by the historical actuality of the Holocaust; it takes as its subject the experience of "survivor guilt." Its fictional protagonist, Jakob Beer (played as a child by Robbie Kay and as a man by Stephen Dillane), escapes from the Nazis but loses his family. He is rescued by Athos Roussos (Rade Serbedzija), a Greek archaeologist who was working in Poland on a dig and discovered Jakob hiding in the woods. Somehow -- the film is unclear on exactly how -- Athos smuggles Jakob out of Poland to his home in Greece, and after the war the two emigrate to Canada, where Athos has been invited to teach. Jakob grows up haunted by his childhood trauma, and his first marriage, to a woman named Alex (Rosamund Pike), ends when she reads his journals and discovers what a barrier Jakob's experiences have created between them. Jakob is particularly tormented by the loss of his sister, Bella (Nina Dobrev), a talented musician, who often appears in his dreams. Even after publishing a book about his life, Jakob doesn't fully overcome the past until after the death of Athos, whose wisdom he comes to appreciate with the help of another woman, Michaela (Ayelet Zurer). There is a subplot involving the Jewish couple across the hall from Athos and Jakob in Canada, whose son, Ben (Ed Stoppard), grows up hating his father, a Holocaust survivor, for his harshness: The father, for example, berates Ben for not finishing the apple he has been eating, reminding him how grateful people in the camps would have been for the food. Despite excellent performances from everyone, the film sinks too often into sentimentality and stereotypes: Serbedzija's performance is a standout, but he can't overcome the fact that Athos, though a university professor, is presented as too much the wise and kindly peasant-sage, preaching the value of ties to the earth. There are some major gaps in the narrative, like the journey from Poland to Greece, and some overall shapelessness, and the ending is much too pat.