Mansfield Park
Reviewed by:David Perry
(Dir: Patricia Rozema, Starring Frances O'Connor, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola, Embeth Davidtz, Harold Pinter, Lindsay Duncan, Victoria Hamilton, James Purefoy, Justine Waddell, Hugh Bonneville, Sheila Gish, Sophia Myles, and Hannah Taylor-Gordon)
Mansfield Park is one of those costume dramas that just do not work. Sure costume dramas have a certain knack for being good, probably because almost all of them are from classic pieces of literature, but every once and a while, a bad one will jump up. The reason that some do not work is usually not because of a poor story, but because of an inability of the screenwriter and director to make the material flow.
The best men to make costume dramas seem to be Ishmael Merchant and James Ivory, the fellows that brought us Room with a View, Howard's End, and Remains of the Day. What they do with costume dramas is incredible. I think that most critics would agree that they made the best costume dramas of the eighties and nineties (though their last film, a non-costume drama named A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, failed to turn heads).
If Merchant-Ivory have the costume drama production taken, it is Jane Austen who seems to have the adaptation taken. In recent years, her works have been hot property for costume dramas. In the last twenty years, Pride and Prejudice has been made twice, Sense and Sensibility made twice, Mansfield Park made twice, Northanger Abbey made twice, and Emma made thrice (one of which being the Emma set in modern-day Clueless). The most recent is that second Mansfield Park.
Though considered by Austen to be her finest work, it is generally considered by her fans to be her biggest disappointment. I'll come out and admit that I had never become acquainted with the work, not surprising considering that I have actually never read an Austen novel.
The film adaptation (which also used Austen's personal letters as a jumping point) is about Fanny Price (O'Connor), a young lady that has grown up with a noble rich family though she herself is poor. Her mother and father send her off to an aunt since they think that she will be raised well in the Bertram household. There she finds herself adored by Mr. and Mrs. Bertram (Pinter and Duncan), as well as the youngest son Edmund (Miller). She and Edmund pretty much grow up together, and they seem like the perfect couple to get married, but both are blind to this. When Henry and Mary Crawford (Nivola and Davidtz), a well to do brother-sister pair, come to the Bertram household, each one takes to liking Fanny and Edmund, which is great news for Mr. Bertram, whose eldest daughter Maria (Hamilton) had just married a rogue (Bonneville). The Crawfords both set out to get the hands of Edmund and Fanny, who are fine with each of their suitors at first.
The film is overlong and boring. There are moments in which the fanciful and rather enjoyable direction save it, but that is too much of a rarity. I had liked Frances O'Connor in the Australian heist film Kiss or Kill, but I did not see the same ability in this performance. Nivola and Miller both seem to be falling over their parts, pretty sad considering that they both have shown much better work (Nivola: Face/Off; Miller: Trainspotting). The actors that came off the best were Davidtz and Pinter, who successfully evoke a raw appeal that none of the other cast contain. The story is nice, not the greatest thing in the world, but still enjoyable.
In fact the film is not that bad, if not for the fact that the bad acting and the excessive length (I always get raised eyebrows when I refer to a film being overlong when it is only about ninety minutes, but this could have been done in much less time) I might have given it a recommendation. But as it is, long and flawed, Mansfield Park is no Emma, Sense and Sensibility, or even Clueless.