Mansfield Park – PBS’s The Complete Jane Austen
Posted in Entertainment, Review on January 29th, 2008
A bit late with this, but I did manage to see Sunday’s installment of The Complete Jane Austen — Mansfield Park. The previous version of Mansfield Park that I’d seen was directed by Patricia Rozema and starred Hannah Taylor-Gordon
(DVD cover pictured to the left). While that one was indeed a nice movie, it didn’t have the flavor of Austen and had been considerably modernized for feminine equality and sensibilities. Unfortunately, Jane Austen wrote for her times not ours and while many of her women are strong characters, they acted within the bounds of class and society in which they found themselves.
The Masterpiece Theatre version directed by Iain B. MacDonald was much closer to the heart of Jane Austen’s novel. I read the novel several years ago, and while I occasionally reread Austen (her books are some of my comfort reading), I haven’t reread Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is sent at a young age to live with relatives as her family can no longer handle all their children. She therefore has a precarious position — neither one of them or a stranger. Fanny manages to grow up without making waves and secretly in love with her cousin Edmund. Life goes on, Fanny remains in the background and then the Crawfords visit. Mary Crawford and her brother are on a par socially with the Bertrams but they’re schemers and out for mischief. This is only one of the plot threads. The movie, not having the time to deal with the full texture of the novel extracts only this limited storyline and uses that for the movie. While it’s satisfying for what it is, it does make me wish for a fully coverage of the novel with all it’s intrigue and plot twists intact.
So, once again a miss but only because of time constraints, at least the characters acted as one would expect from the book (its time and social milieu intact). Fanny was much more the Fanny of Jane Austen than in previous versions so that’s a win. So, enjoyable but forget what you know of the book and just enjoy an interesting movie, well done but not quite Mansfield Park.