Word: austen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reputation for his ability to exploit his character's internal conflicts in any time or place, be it Jane Austen's England in his 1995 release Sense and Sensibility, or the alienated '70s suburbia of 1997's The Ice Storm. Yet his latest project, Ride With the Devil, based on Daniel Woodrell's novel Woe to Live On, reflects the damage too much praise can have on a director. All that distinguishes Ride with the Devil as anything other than a glorified action flick is a splattering of historical nuances and the occasional flirtation with character complexity...
Adapting the most confounding of Jane Austen's works, Rozema has conflated the author and her creation, Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor). The Fanny of the novel, a mousy poor relative come to live in the eponymous great house, is here, like the author, a witty observer of the swells at romantic play. She's also the patient, strong-willed mistress of her own romantic destiny who finally achieves her long-desired true love. The movie may not entirely please Austen purists, but it is well acted, and it achieves a strong, smart, engaging life...
...Extending this sort of brash independence and playful wickedness to the rest of the film, Rozema has departed quite a bit from the subdued, "pretty" tone taken by other Austen filmmakers.And in losing this, she's brought social criticism to the fore. The film practically drips with satire--but it's a satire that's not entirely Austen. Of course, the story itself mocks many of the mores of the society Austen depicts, and the movie, accordingly, is not without some excellent moments (Harold Pinter makes an excellent pre-Victorian patriarch, dropping proper ultimatums right and left...
...that raucous spirit that we see a series of modifications: The Crawfords, Austen's villains, are noticeably less distasteful and quite unabashedly sexual; in general, characters are more unguardedly flirtatious, witticisms a little sharper, plot changes less subtle; and crowning it all is the "sex scene". The infidelity discovered via implication in a letter in Austens novel becomes a visual, shocking debacle in the film, quite in character with the brash nature of the adaptation. Amazingly, the director has planned her story in a way that makes this acceptable by keeping with her more open, admittedly "extreme" tone throughout...
...film, we're ready for the traditional, Austenian happy ending. Rozema has made us want it by putting us through a more turbid, uninhibited version of what is coldly reserved from the novel. Rozema has said that she thinks of Fanny Price as a "test" created by Austen to experiment with the reactions of those around her. Certainly Rozema has made Fanny and Mansfield itself into a test of her own. But can America handle Austen with a little modern spice...