Miss Austen Regrets
Miss Austen Regrets, this past Sunday’s entry in the PBS Masterpiece series, The Complete Jane Austen, received decidedly mixed reviews. I enjoyed it, though. Like the better adaptations, it made me want to learn more.
Those who didn’t like the production, like Maureen Ryan, said it relied too much on details of Jane’s life. This would help explain why MAR seems to have been better received by the readership at Austenblog, who name Olivia Williams’s performance and the letter-burning scene at the end as particular high points.
I enjoyed Gillian’s Anderson’s prefatory remark that so little historical record remains of Jane that we can only imagine her life. I thought Olivia Williams made an interesting and complicated Jane, and I really liked the scene where Miss Austen sees her books on display at the Prince Regent’s, and where she tells her niece that the only way to have a man like Mr. Darcy is to make him up. I also appreciated how the adaptation highlighted how Austen’s novels are more than romances–they’re each a different investigation into the social and financial pressures to marry, among many other things.
I did dislike some things, as well. There was shaky, handheld camera work, which should have stopped being in vogue, and is hardly needed to convey life in Austen’s time. There were long-held shots on domestic and outdoor images, which indicated to me that the creators were hard-pressed to extend the few known details of Austen to 90 minutes. This is an interesting contrast to the recent versions of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, which tried to long, complex novels into an all-too-brief hour and a half.
I’m noticing a trend that the adaptations Janeites like are not liked by critics, who don’t get all the details that were right, while the adaptations that take the most liberties annoy those who know better, but end up delighting those who don’t. In Entertainment Weekly this week, Becoming Jane gets a B+ while The Jane Austen Book Club, based on Karen Joy Fowler’s well-detailed book, only gets a C+. This was the reverse appraisal of Richard Roeper when the films came out, and he seemed rather more well informed on Jane than I would have thought.
Miss Austen Regrets seems to have been better received by lovers of Jane than by critics in general, perhaps because it was attentive to details like the order of the novels, if not her hats.
February 6th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
My parents, who’ve both read all the Jane Austen there is to read and likely more than once, both really really liked “Becoming Jane.” in fact, my Dad is positive that in years to come, people will be looking back and thinking “gee, why didn’t i see this years ago?” and not even once thinking of some of the films that are on everyone’s lists…