Mansfield Park – 1999 | 110 mins | Drama, Romance | Colour

Plot Synopsis

In taking on Jane Austens Mansfield Park – long stigmatised as the most emotionally reticent and indeed dullest of her novels – director Patricia Rozema has made a number of audacious decisions to modernise.

The film is adapted not merely from the book, but also from Austen’s letters and journals – which presumably provides literary licence for the movie’s more speculative interpretations. The result is a qualified success. With Mansfield Park, Rozema cannot deliver the sucrose-romantic rush that Ang Lee conjured up for Sense and Sensibility. But what she has done is to present a handsome and finely acted account of this more oblique and muted work – together with a challenging, experimental look at its historical dimension.

It boasts excellent performances from Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price and especially Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas Bertram, the glowering master of Mansfield Park. Pinter’s compelling physical presence and the timbre and control of his voice show him to be a simply remarkable classical actor. Rozema amplifies the novel’s playful dance of courtship into something more explicitly sexual: Henry Crawford and Maria are discovered in flagrante and the sisterly intimacies of Fanny and Mary Crawford are given a little homo-erotic spin.

With slavery, we have something more difficult. Since Edward Said’s writings on the subject, every wised up Jane Austen fan knows that her decorous drawing room world was at least partly financed by the evil of slavery. Rozema is quite justified in drawing out the realities of Sir Thomas’s plantation in the Indies. Her problem is that, if we are not thoroughly to despise the heroes and heroines, they must have abolitionist sentiments put in their mouths – and that is simply not convincing. Moreover, the implied compassionate equation of slavery with a wife’s servitude in marriage is quite a stretch. But Rozema’s screenplay does build this dark secret into a storyline with bravura and style, even if the end result is a little more Bronte than Austen.

Review© Peter Bradshaw.