Trailerology: Pride & Prejudice
Submitted by jim on Fri, 06/03/2005 - 07:53
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Anyone who's seen the marvelous BBC version of Pride & Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth will cringe repeatedly watching the trailer for the Kiera Knightly version.
If by "repeatedly" you mean "every time we cut to a fog-enshrouded, romanticized landscape or the very modern-looking Keira Knightly appears" I know exactly what you mean.
I was more bothered by the opening voice-over: “In an era when marrying a rich man was the most a woman could hope for.” If the movie gets more people interested in Jane Austen, though, I won't complain.
I wonder if they were trying to approximate that famous first line from the novel ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife") but without the gentle irony. I actually have nothing against literary adaptations per se, but for my taste they should either stick close to the tone (at least) of the original or stray wildly and creatively, like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. Who knows, I might even end up enjoying this one -- trailers never lie, do they? :) I remember liking Douglas McGrath's Emma, a movie that infuriated some Austenites because of its (minor, to my mind) liberties with text and time period.