Herald rating: * * * *
Running time: 110 mins
Rental: Today
Review: Ewan McDonald
Watch for Anglophiles slathering all over the video shops this week: three new releases are hymns ancient and modern to the English way of life from the 18th century to sometime around today.
Mansfield Park is not an adaptation of
Jane Austen's novel. Director Patricia Rozema chose passages from Austen's journals and letters and adapted them to the life of Fanny Price, the heroine of that book.
Fanny (Hannah Taylor Gordon) and her poor family live in a cottage in Portsmouth. Fanny's mother married for love while her sister, Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan), married for a title and lives at the estate of Mansfield Park in a laudanum-induced haze.
She sends for a niece so Fanny is bundled into a carriage.
Years later a 20-something Fanny (Frances O'Connor) is still there, with Lord Bertram (Harold Pinter), the Lady, still hazy after all these years, his drunken older son Tom, nice younger son Edmund and two passing daughters.
The Crawfords, Henry and sister Mary (Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz), have rented the nearby parsonage with the aim of marrying into the family.
When Lord Bertram tells Fanny that Henry has asked to marry her, and "I have agreed," Fanny says no. She loves Edmund, who is engaged to Mary. Which is not the way young women were expected to behave in Austen's times.
Which is why her books, and this movie, are intelligent, smart and amusing, and for many reared on Melrose/BH/ Shortland Street that's probably the kiss of death for this excellent film.
