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With this twenty-first century-adaptation
of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,
Joe Wright inscribes himself in some prestigious filmic lineage. His version
has been acclaimed as the third “significant” opus of what now seems to be the
“official Darcy trilogy” starting with Robert Leonard’s 1940 version starring
Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, and continuing with Simon Langton’s cult
1995 BBC series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Wright actively chronicles
what he calls in the 2006 Universal DVD bonus “Jane Austen’s realism” or, in
some interviews, “the first piece of British realism” (Fetters). Meanwhile
he also focuses on the complexity inherent in events and characters. Along
with scriptwriter Deborah Moggach, the filmmaker was thus sent back to the
central problem of voice in Austen’s texts: how to adapt at once the
narrative voice’s assertions and commentaries and the texture of the characters’ dialogues and internal
focalization, while making them understandable for a contemporary audience? Acceptable
voyeurs When discussing his adaptation
technique, Wright often refers to his relentless search for the cinematic
equivalent of prose, but what seems to best characterize his work is actually
his way of looking into the Bennets’ private sphere and erasing the allegedly
insurmountable obstacles posed by Austen’s ironic voice. Camera
movements, close-ups, exchanged glances bring to the foreground the intensity
of the characters’ inner lives in a manner which has often little to do with
the classic codes of the Heritage Film subgenre. Made into “acceptable”
voyeurs, the spectators peek in from the very first shots of the introductory
sequence, as the boundaries between the camera and Elizabeth’s points of view
are alternately dissolved and reinstated on screen. In this opening sequence, an ironic
but loving eye is already at work, filling in the filmic space with the
representation of the gentry’s mores and grounds. “We” as spectators and
voyeurs are literally propelled into the relatively protected arena of the
Bennets’ world. In Austen’s novel, with its epigrammatic formulation and
impression of absolute authority of some unidentifiable voice, the narrative’s
celebrated incipit in Chapter I is immediately undermined by the ironical
phrasing and restricted scope of the next sentences: It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in
want of a wife. However little known the feelings or
views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is
so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered
as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. (3) On screen, such an assertion immediately and
forcefully translates into a different signifying system. The Steadicam fluid
shots framing Elizabeth reading a novel as she’s walking back to the family
house operate as some metafilmic allusion to the process of adaptation. They
also introduce us to a very lively household of marriageable daughters and
arguing parents, while skirting any dialogic exchange.1 The eye of the camera captures first
and foremost the intense vitality of Elizabeth as the main actant and this wild
brood of sisters all engaged in various occupations. If the prologue then begins by
fulfilling its Heritage Film obligations of shooting some glorious landscape (here
the English countryside suffused with a golden light), it also discloses a
highly unconventional view of the family’s privacy. In his DVD bonus
commentary, Joe Wright insists on his desire to show “a house full of hormones,”
and the camera rather ostensibly subverts the code of decorum usually imposed
by the Heritage subgenre. It lingers on the laces, bonnets and diverse
pieces of lingerie abandoned on the living room table and films Mary playing
the piano in a backward medium shot, as well as her parents through a window as
they discuss “Netherfield Park [being] let at last.” The camera reveals here the usually
hidden facets and secret habits of the members of the gentry. From the
very beginning, the intrusive eye of this highly mobile camera plays a game of
exposure and concealment in some sort of low-culture versus high-culture
version of the Heritage movie. What is immediately foregrounded, then, is
the language of desire of young, expectant bodies. Narrative
Thresholds Pride & Prejudice was the first feature film for Joe Wright, then a young television
movie-maker. He successfully carves out a distinct territory for himself,
redefining in his own way the mechanisms of adaptation. Much has already
been said about the difficulty of adapting for the screen such a celebrated
classic with complex authorial comments, unclaimed voices and charged dialogues,
but Wright’s strategy seems to entail an ironic response to Elizabeth’s famed
question to Darcy at the end of the novel: “How could you begin?” said she. “I can
comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but
what could set you off in the first place?” To which Darcy answers: “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” (380) By focusing immediately on the “privileged”
daughter and witness, the director delineates a special type of dynamics which
sets her instantly and unmistakably apart. In this sense, his
opening is literally spectacular.
It exposes to the viewer’s gaze the central “reflector” or “centre of
consciousness” that Henry James defines in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady. Meanwhile it also chronicles the
other characters’ points of view. Such a constant shuttle movement in
between several focalizers and angles of vision seems to be what best
characterizes Wright’s approach to the process of adaptation. What the novel’s narrative voice
repeatedly refers to as Elizabeth’s “lively, sportive, manner of talking” (387-88)
is here transferred to the fluid movements of the camera, which actually frames
the vigorous and vivacious characters as well as an amazingly diverse range of
spaces, among England’s most imposing mansions and landscapes (such as the Peak
District National Park). The dramatic settings and open splendor function
as brief references to the aesthetic category of the Picturesque as theorized
by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and William Payne Knight in late eighteenth-century
England. In this respect, the first long take
is characteristic of Wright’s technique since it already provides the key to
the construction of filmic point of view and space. As he insists in his
DVD commentary, “I like these long takes.” The introductory sequence,
actually two shots joining up with the close-up on the white sheets in the
courtyard, tracks Elizabeth back to the family house and establishes her
character as being at once outside and inside or, to be more specific, as
taking part in the action but also as being in the liminal position of the
ironic observer. Wright is overtly playing with the codes of romantic
comedy when he has Elizabeth’s viewpoint merge with the camera’s, ironically
recording in a through-the-window shot her parents quarrelling or, later in the
film, having her comment on “the shame of having such a mother” after Mrs.
Bennet has sent Jane on foot to Netherfield. Staging intimacy, interiority and
introspection in a highly visual
manner seems to be Wright and television playwright Moggach’s most efficient
way of chronicling Elizabeth’s inner journey to enhanced perception. In
her book on The Art of Adaptation,
Linda Seger states that [a] narrator can move in and out of a
character’s life, even going inside a character’s head to let us know how the
character thinks and feels. . . . We identify with the character
psychologically, emotionally and in terms of the action he or she takes.
In a novel, the narrator stands between us and the story to help us understand
and interpret events. When we watch a film, we are an objective observer
of the actions. What we see is what we get. Even if characters tell
us their feelings through a voice-over in a film, we may not believe them.
Without the narrator to guide us, we may not know whether characters are lying
or not. . . . Film doesn’t give us an interior look at a character.
A novel does. (19-20) In Wright’s movie however, the spectator is
seduced into becoming much more than just “an objective observer” as he gets as
close to Elizabeth as possible. This peculiar vantage point launches his
own hermeneutic quest, partly reflecting Elizabeth’s own necessarily limited
view. Just as the line of sheets obstructs vision in the prologue, so is
the heroine’s full perception hampered for the longest time in the film. And,
along with the swing sequence when Charlotte announces her engagement, the
series of close shots of Elizabeth lost in thought at Hunsford rectory after
Darcy’s first proposal is probably the scene when the moment and the process of
introspection are best framed. In this strange mirror sequence, the use
of lighting functions as an objective correlative helping the viewer understand
very quickly what’s unfolding inside, thus becoming a filmic equivalent of the
mixture of third person narration, internal focalization, and virtual interior
monologue found at the end of Volume II, Chapter XI. On screen, Moggach and Wright
ironically reconstruct the central notion of “reflection[s]” in the interplay
between the two mediums. These reflections literally turn into mirror
images of intense mental projections on screen: The tumult of her mind was now
painfully great. . . . That she should receive an offer of marriage from
Mr. Darcy! . . . She continued in very agitating
reflections. . . . (193-94) In the movie, the entire section translates
into various and at times blurred medium long-shots and medium close-ups and
close/insert shots of Elizabeth or of Darcy’s letter while the camera frames
Darcy in the background coming in to deposit his explanatory note. The
montage foregrounds the manner in which Elizabeth supposedly fixedly gazes at
the mirror while looking directly at the camera and the spectator. Like
the recurrent shots through the window, these repeated immersions into
Elizabeth’s conscience all provide some specific insight into her perception
and interpretation of the scene. The play of soft lighting and
darkness, especially as reflected on Elizabeth’s thoughtful face, at once marks
the passage of time and functions as a companion piece to the process of
complete reassessment of the whole situation. The chromatic shift from
daylight to dusk and then night-time underlines her re-interpretation of
Darcy’s character, of her own feelings, and of herself. The entire
sequence probably constitutes one of the film’s best examples of condensation, reconstructing
within the scope of a few minutes the actual depth of action and narration
unfolding over three chapters in the book (193-209). The sequence’s oneiric
dimension2 is also emphasized by the
fact that Darcy’s phantasmatic figure starts reading the letter and then
vanishes while continuing to read it in voice-over. Paradoxically, this
condensation technique also operates as expansion since the heroine’s symbolic
passage through the looking glass calls for the metaphorical recreation of
another storyline and fosters a new interpretation of facts and potentialities.
In a striking visual mode, it also calls for a re-reading of signs, precisely
thanks to a different semiotic system. The
rules of attraction It is, of course, cliché to
underline the intensity of Lizzy’s inner journey and to picture her profound inner
displacement in spatial terms, but it’s also a very effective way of appraising
the extent of her (r)evolution. Joe Wright chooses to do so in a highly
sensuous manner. His representation of her re-evaluation process is
firmly rooted in what could be called the
bodily dimension. It seems to register on screen with increased vigor
as well as slightly out-of-focus and off-center extreme close-ups of
Elizabeth’s face during her sleepless night at Hunsford parsonage. It
also culminates at Pemberley when Elizabeth’s mental projections eventually
take shape—“flesh”—as her wandering eye takes in the voluptuous nude bodies
painted on the entrance hall ceiling or the seductive lines and expressive
folds of the master’s marble bust, and eventually at Longbourn during the
lovers’ first embrace. The mental journey topos is here superimposed on
the deciphering eye motif. In fact, starting with this long
sequence of introspection at the Collinses, what’s unfolding is at once some
acknowledgment of the paradoxical nature of perception, and hence the
experience of the painful process of seeing in a new way, and a slow and steady
initiation into the importance of measure and harmony. In both mediums,
Elizabeth seems to be standing at the intersection of three aesthetic modes of
representation: literature, cinema, and painting, on the one hand; and
literature, cinema, and sculpture, on the other. Consequently, the
reformatting of vision at Pemberley somehow becomes the epitome of the process
of adaptation. The eye is attracted—in all possible meanings of the term—to
this new sense unfolding and new picture forming and has to learn meanwhile new
rules of proportion. In the novel, the reader is
introduced to these new rules of proportion during Elizabeth’s visit to
Pemberley. Elizabeth reappraises Darcy as she admires the perfect balance
between nature and artifice in his beautiful grounds: They had now entered a beautiful
walk by the side of the water, and every step was bringing forward a nobler
fall of ground, or a finer reach of the woods to which they were approaching;
but it was some time before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it; and, though
she answered mechanically to the repeated appeals of her uncle and aunt, and
seemed to direct her eyes to such objects as they pointed out, she
distinguished no part of the scene. Her thoughts were all fixed on that
one spot at Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr Darcy then was. . . .
They entered the woods, and bidding
adieu to the river for a while, ascended some of the higher grounds; whence, in
spots where the opening of the trees gave the eye power to wander, were many
charming views of the valley, the opposite hills, with the long range of woods
overspreading many, and occasionally part of the stream. (253) This passage at once literalizes and metaphorizes
the earlier notion of “prospect” the voice uses: “Elizabeth, after
slightly surveying it, went to a window to enjoy its prospect” (246). The
term, of course, evokes in the language of the picturesque some gorgeous view
of the countryside, but it also signifies hopes for the future. As the accuracy
of Elizabeth’s perception increases, so does the visual impact of things and
symbols around her, and consequently the critical dimension of her gaze
decreases. The filmmaker transforms this keen
perception into re-envisioning. Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley functions
as a matching sequence for the mirror episode at Hunsford. In both scenes
the camera eye is intently staring at her. At Pemberley, however, Elizabeth
is by no means watching a representation of herself but a reconstitution at
once palpable and mental of Darcy’s character. In this sense, filmic
space becomes precisely fantasized, imaginary space projecting the main
protagonist’s viewpoint on screen and hence implicating the spectator. Inventing
somehow a brand-new version of Darcy in this sequence, Elizabeth, framed in
tight shots, also watches a reflection of her own desire. In the novel,
Elizabeth moves from viewing Darcy’s portrait inside the house to seeing Darcy
in the flesh in the grounds of Pemberley. Wright slightly modifies this
sequence: Elizabeth first views Darcy’s bust in the sculpture gallery and
then wanders further into the interior spaces of Pemberley to surprise Darcy
and Georgiana in a private section of the house. Her voyeuristic
intrusion into Darcy’s intimacy sends her running outside, scared as much by
her own desire as by a breach of decorum—“the impropriety of her being found
there” (252), as the novel’s narrator says. Affording
more clarity The whole sequence at Pemberley,
with its highly sensual, revolving camera movements, materializes on screen the
inscription of Elizabeth’s desire. The heroine’s eye can no longer afford
a divided, ironic vision. Pemberley’s grounds and house, in their
picturesque and truly artistic dimension, force her to see through, to reach for the essence of the place and hence, of
course, its owner. The entire sequence stages a revolution in perception
and technically turns Elizabeth from a critic into a believer, transforming her
detachment into adherence. Joe Wright seems to have somehow
literalized the notion of revolution.
The camera launches into some sort of contorted high-angle crane shot, thus
inscribing within the frame the notions of impingement on some spectacular ground
and discovery of some profoundly noble and
superior order. At this stage,
the camera eye is still an external focalizer selecting its own perspectives,
Pemberley’s endless, wide tree-lined majestic access road for instance, while
filming as well the scenery and characters. The master shot of the façade,
however, as if stolen from the other side of the lake behind the tree branches
and wild grasses, already establishes the birth of a different type of gaze.
The slow and caressing right to left tracking shot of the camera eye is about
to merge with Elizabeth’s internal point of view. Curiously enough, her troubled
and occasionally out-of-focus vision (her “perturbation” [245], says the narrative
voice) is constantly pitted against the perfect proportions of the woods, lake
and mansion, thus announcing at once her feeling submerged with the
magnificence and “natural beauty” (245) of the estate and the violent
readjustment of vision and eruption of desire she is to undergo: It was a large, handsome, stone building,
standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;—and
in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but
without any artificial appearance. (245) The medium close-up of her taking in the splendor
of the mansion shows her laughing before a blurred background, not out of
derision this time but in utter disbelief of what she’s actually witnessing. Irony here seems to be displaced
onto this new quality of vision, going beyond the veil on the marble woman’s
face she sees in the museum. It’s also transferred to the way in which
Elizabeth eventually gains some more privileged access to the master of the
house. Her wandering eye seems to be stroking whatever it encounters so
that even before she actually stops in front of Darcy’s bust and can match this
particular image with her various representations of him, her desire has been
effectively let loose. At this stage, what could be called the performing gaze becomes a desiring one.
The shot of a nude body lying prone and merging with a first blurred view of
Darcy’s head effects the mixture of internal and external focalization while
the camera amorously revolves around the statue and eventually Elizabeth
herself gazing in awe. It also materializes the moment of recognition of
her true feelings for him with the medium close-up on her own thoughtful and
loving face—the moment the narrative voice chronicles: “There was
certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards
the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance”
(250). From this moment on, the camera tracks her in a low angle shot,
suddenly magnifying her whereas she had mostly been framed in high angle shots
before. She not only closely watches but also touches the various objects
lying around until her eye can focus on the image of Pemberley’s picturesque
gardens (first redoubled then tripled), but mostly until she can get a “clearer
picture” and confront a flesh and blood Darcy. This particular moment of
the filmic diegesis somehow enacts what Darcy had told her earlier at the
Netherfield ball: “I hope to afford you more clarity in the future.” The emergence of desire
paradoxically turns Elizabeth into a reluctant voyeur. The eye is now
endowed with the sensuousness displayed by the wandering hand as it is
literally offered new perspectives. The tight shot of Elizabeth, framed
in the doorway, peeking at Georgiana at the piano and then at Darcy tenderly
embracing his sister, is the first actual stage of her sensuous conversion.
All three senses of sight, touch and hearing now combine as she is guided back
to the living room by the sound of music. She first discovers a mirror
reflection of Georgiana playing the pianoforte and then of Georgiana and Darcy
hugging merrily. Then and only then, when she has penetrated Darcy’s family
intimacy, do her intense amazement and inner turmoil register on screen in a
split-second zoom-in on a fragment of her face. The mechanics of desire triggered ever
since the first sight at the Meryton ball has thus become visibly and
vigorously inscribed on faces and bodies. And such intrusion and
recognition of desire put an end to the spatial and intellectual confinement that
has characterized Elizabeth’s world. Her sudden epiphany in the white
marble room is much more of an awakening of the senses—as the camera filming
her lit-up eyes shows—than an enlightenment through reason. And it’s
probably one of the oddities of this early twenty-first-century adaptation of
the Austenian text that it should mostly stage female sexual attraction in its
early and constantly repressed phases. Even in the night-time coda of the
Universal Studios DVD added at a later date for an American audience, desire
hardly registers on screen with the violence of unleashed sexuality. Capturing
feminine desire Contrasting with the late-eighteenth-
or early-nineteenth-century English sense of propriety, as we see in the
prologue, the expression of desire in this movie mostly falls to the women.
Most of the film’s sense of decorum and restraint actually is exhibited by the
male protagonists. The camera only briefly frames Bingley’s notorious
fits of embarrassment or Darcy’s fists clenched in sexual frustration—however
noticeable the close-ups of his tight fists may be. It certainly lingers,
though, on the originally undirected desire of the circle of women. In
fact, most of its firing stages seem to depend on women’s rituals and original
stratagems, from biting remarks while dancing, to intense looks or flurries of
ribbons negligently exposed. In the filmic adaptation, Wright and
Moggach have at their command enunciatory procedures as potentially complex as
any other narrative mode. The core of their mise en scène is certainly the intense energy emanating from these
female bodies agitated with the irrepressible urge of getting married while
painstakingly trying to remain proper.
The overall rapid tempo enhanced by the final montage and the constant play on
close-ups of vivacious and longing females are also emblematic of these narrational
strategies belying the moments of stasis inherent in the life of an English
gentry family. The occasionally hectic rhythm of the film’s editing is best
exemplified by the somber sequence of the horse-drawn carriage rushing back to
Longbourn after Elizabeth learns of Lydia’s elopement. It is actually
inserted in between the Pemberley sequence and the scene staging the devastated
condition of the Bennet household. In the later section of the movie for
instance, after Bingley has proposed to Jane, the camera symmetrically
reproduces in a night-time visual echo its slow tender waltz around the
Bennets’ house. Once again, it exposes female bodies engaged in various
occupations and goes inward through the window to witness yet another exchange
between Jane and Elizabeth about the necessity of finding the right mate.
But Lady Catherine’s arrival imposes another and final change of tempo and
twist of the filmic diegesis. In this confrontational scene, which truly
functions as a metaphor for desire, the rich play of shadows and the golden
tones of the candles lighting up the two women’s faces operates as a
transitional stage in the film’s narrational economy. The whole mechanism
of desire feeds here on the hero’s absence, and Elizabeth’s body is
compulsively set going again, until the ultimate moment when desire, once
fulfilled, somehow met in the flesh,
changes status. Elizabeth’s ultimate walk by herself
in the countryside functions then as a companion piece to her first walk in the
prologue. It somehow literalizes Elizabeth’s central question put to Darcy:
“‘How could you begin?’” (380). It also summarizes “the distinctive
grammar of the medium” to which Brian McFarlane refers (“It wasn’t like that” 169).
In the scene, clarity and intensity are effected in every possible way. The
topos of romantic love and the story of its birth combine Jane Austen’s
technique of mapping out the heroine’s progress from blindness to insight and
of vitality in dialogue as a dramatic mode, with Joe Wright’s technique of
using vitality as a visual mode.
After all, in another romantic cliché, the sun eventually comes out in fiery brightness,
framing in a two-shot the two heroes joining heads. Wright has, as
McFarlane also explains, redefined and expanded the contours of the collective
process of adapting a literary work of art: The issue of authorship, always complex in
film, is especially so in relation to the film version of a literary work.
Not only will the directorial signature inscribe itself with varying degrees of
forcefulness on adapted material, not only will the spectre of the novel’s
author, especially in the case of the classic or the best-selling novel, hover
over the spectator and critic’s reading of the film; also, the status of the
author(s) of the screenplay will intervene between the former two. (Novel to Film 35) With script-writer Deborah Moggach, Joe Wright
has imposed a new reading system on the various strata of the original
narrative. NOTES 1. Most of Jane Austen’s text is
in fact dialogue transcribing the various characters’ opinions and special
natures. Obviously, these sometimes long exchanges would be ill-adapted
to the filmic medium. 2. In between dream, pure vision
and reconstruction, Elizabeth is once again framed standing on the brink of
some new state. WORKS CITED Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: OUP, 1932. Fetters, Sara Michelle. “It’s Austen All
Over Again.” Interview with Joe Wright. 2005. 20 May
2007 http://www.moviefreak.com/features/interviews/joewright.htm.
McFarlane, Brian. “It wasn’t like that in
the book.” Literature/Film
Quarterly 28 (2000): 163-69. _____. Novel to Film. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning
Fact and Fiction into Film. New
York: Holt, 1992. Wright, Joe, dir. Pride & Prejudice. DVD.
Focus Features, 2005. |
