Mansfield Park
USA/UK 1999
Reviewed by Andy Richards
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
England, the early 19th century. Fanny Price leaves her home in Portsmouth to live with wealthy relatives on their vast country estate Mansfield Park. There, she is treated as a social inferior by her aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia. Only Edmund, the Bertram's second son, treats her kindly.
Fanny grows into a spirited young woman. Sir Thomas departs on a business trip to his plantations in Antigua, accompanied by Tom. The Mansfield routine is disrupted by the arrival of charismatic siblings Henry and Mary Crawford. Henry flirts with Maria, despite her engagement to Mr Rushworth; Mary has designs on Edmund. Tom returns from Antigua, and proposes putting on a play. The rehearsals are a pretext for much unseemly flirtation by the Crawfords, but the performance is prevented by the return of Sir Thomas.
Maria marries Mr Rushmore. A debut ball is held in honour of Fanny, where Henry declares his love for her. Secretly in love with Edmund, she spurns him, enraging Sir Thomas who sends her back to Portsmouth. She is abruptly recalled to Mansfield Park when Tom falls ill. While nursing Tom, Fanny discovers some of his sketches of abuses against the Antiguan slaves. She also finds Henry in bed with Maria, who then runs off with him. Mary's callous behaviour repels Edmund. Soon after Tom recovers, Edmund confesses his love for Fanny which she reciprocates.
Review
Given the recent spate of Jane Austen adaptations (notably, Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, Douglas McGrath's Emma and the BBC productions of Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice), one could be forgiven for anticipating diminishing returns from what is widely viewed as the author's least satisfying and most intractably moralistic work. But that would be to reckon without the contribution of Canadian director Patricia Rozema who, disdaining a purist approach, offers some smart and suggestive variations on the usual Regency rituals.
Rozema's previous features (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and When Night Is Falling) have all dealt with meek, repressed female protagonists who are initiated into new social and cultural worlds, before attaining self-sufficiency. In this respect, Austen's Fanny, who arrives at Mansfield Park a timid and socially unsure young woman only to become an indispensable member of the household, would seem to be another variant on Rozema's heroines.
Yet the Fanny of Rozema's film, as incarnated by a radiant Frances O'Connor, is resolutely all the things the Fanny of the novel is not: vivacious, artistic, even sexy - a self-confessed "wild beast". This Fanny is, in fact, something of a hybrid of Austen's heroine and the novelist herself (Fanny's stories and her updates to her sister Susan are based on Austen's own early writings and letters). In Fanny, Rozema creates a screen heroine we can root for (more in the mould of Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet), and a film that stands alongside the rest of her oeuvre as a paean to female artistic and romantic independence.
Rozema's emancipatory agenda is significantly different from the novel's more sober, stoic preoccupation with the upholding of true moral consciousness through abstinence and self-denial. Austen's Fanny, as the unimpeachable repository of older, High Tory values, must strike modern sensibilities as something of a prig. Rozema's heroine, on the other hand, is a modern woman oppressed by an antiquated patriarchal society. To throw this theme into sharper relief, Rozema has chosen to make the slavery issue (fleetingly alluded to in the novel) explicit. At one point, Fanny mortifies her family by raising the subject of abolition. The scene in which she discovers Tom's sketches of atrocities (gang rape included) committed against the slaves on his father's Antiguan plantations is shocking in its deliberate rupturing of the film's predominantly genteel mise en scène.
Rozema's point is that Mansfield Park, and the amorous escapades of its wealthy inhabitants, are founded on and sustained by this debased form of exploitation. This is certainly an intriguing opening-out of the novel, but in doing so the film appropriates the moral high ground in a way that further distances it from the delicacy and ambiguity of Austen's insights.
Rozema might shift the moral dynamics of the tale to suit our modern broad-stroke sensibilities, but she also has fun with the novel's romantic conventions. The initial entrance of the glamorous, seductive Crawfords is played as a comic cliché, a languorous camera tilt up their bodies intercut with hot flushes from the assembled onlookers. The central ball scene - filmed with candle-lit intimacy and rhapsodic camera swirls - and a couple of fanciful sapphic interludes between Fanny and Embeth Davidtz's serpentine, cigar-smoking Mary Crawford also confirm this as the most overtly erotic of Austen adaptations to date.
Credits
- Director
- Patricia Rozema
- Producer
- Sarah Curtis
- Screenplay
- Patricia Rozema
- Based on the novel by Jane Austen and on her letters and journals
- Director of Photography
- Michael Coulter
- Editor
- Martin Walsh
- Production Designer
- Christopher Hobbs
- Music
- Lesley Barber
- ©Miramax HAL Films Ltd.
- Production Companies
- Miramax Films and BBC Films present in association with the Arts Council of
- England a Miramax HAL Films production
- Supported by the
- National Lottery through the Arts Council of England
- Executive Producers
- Trea Hoving
- David Aukin
- Colin Leventhal
- David M. Thompson
- Bob Weinstein
- Harvey Weinstein
- Line Producer
- Cathy Lord
- Associate Producer
- Allon Reich
- Executive in Charge of Production
- Sara Geater
- Script Executive
- Miramax HAL Films:
- Christian Colson
- Production Co-ordinators
- Julia Bennett
- Miramax HAL Films:
- Laura Madden
- Production Manager
- Hilary Benson
- Location Managers
- Bill Darby
- Additional:
- Greg Jordan
- Post-production Supervisor
- Tania Windsor Blunden
- Assistant Directors
- Mary Soan
- Mark Layton
- Candy Marlowe
- Alexander Oakley
- 2nd Unit:
- Ken Tuohy
- Script Supervisor
- Diana Dill
- Casting
- Gail Stevens
- Crowd ADR Group:
- Marcella Riordan
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Chris Plevin
- Aerial Photography
- Flight Logistics
- Hover-Cam Ltd
- Aerial Photography Pilots/Operators
- Philip George
- John Jennings
- Mike Parker
- Aerial Photography Cameraman
- Gifford Hooper
- Camera Operator
- Philip Sindall
- Steadicam Operators
- Peter Cavaciutti
- Jan Pester
- Digital Visual Effects
- The Computer Film Company
- Digital Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Tim Webber
- Digital Visual Effects Producer:
- Drew Jones
- Senior Digital Compositing Artists:
- Robert Duncan
- Tom Debenham
- Digital Paint Artist:
- Alex Paymen
- Digital Scanning/Recording:
- Steve Tizzard
- Special Effects
- Evolution FX
- Special Effects Supervisor:
- Richard Van Den Berg
- Special Effects Technicians:
- Matthew Granger
- Mark Meddings
- Alan Hawes
- Gary Cohen
- Art Director
- Andrew Munro
- Set Decorator
- Patricia Edwards
- Tom's Painting/Original Slave Drawings
- Christopher Hobbs
- Draughtsman
- Sarah Tozer
- Scenic Artists
- Alice Milburn Foster
- Steve Mitchell
- Costume Designer
- Andrea Galer
- Wardrobe Mistress
- Cynthea Dowling
- Make-up
- Designer:
- Veronica Brebner
- Additional Artist:
- Paul Gooch
- Hair/Make-up Artists
- Astrid Schikorra
- Tamsin Dorling
- Helen Smith
- Liz Tag
- Title Sequence
- Kemistry
- Film Opticals
- General Screen Enterprises
- Musicians
- Glass Harmonica:
- Alisdair Malloy
- Hurdy Gurdy:
- Nigel Eaton
- Percussion:
- Frank Ricotti
- Music Conductors
- Nick Ingman
- James Shearman
- Orchestra Leader
- Gavyn Wright
- Additional Orchestrations
- Nick Ingman
- James Shearman
- Music Supervisor
- Bob Last
- Music Engineers
- Steve McLaughlin
- Nick Wollage
- Soundtrack
- "Djongna (Slavery)" by/performed by Salif Keita
- Choreography
- Jane Gibson
- Production Sound Mixer
- Peter Glossop
- Re-recording Mixers
- Ray Merrin
- Graham Daniel
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Glenn Freemantle
- Dialogue Editor
- Max Hoskins
- Foley
- Artists:
- Andie Derrick
- Peter Burgis
- Editor:
- Miriam Ludbrook
- Animals Supplied by
- Timbertops
- Horsemaster
- Emma Hepple
- Cast
- Embeth Davidtz
- Mary Crawford
- Jonny Lee Miller
- Edmund Bertram
- Alessandro Nivola
- Henry Crawford
- Frances O'Connor
- Fanny Price
- Harold Pinter
- Sir Thomas Bertram
- Lindsay Duncan
- Lady Bertram/Frances Price
- Sheila Gish
- Mrs Norris
- Victoria Hamilton
- Maria Elizabeth Bertram
- James Purefoy
- Tom Bertram
- Hugh Bonneville
- Mr Rushworth
- Justine Waddell
- Julia Frances Bertram
- Hannah Taylor Gordon
- young Fanny
- Talya Gordon
- young Susan
- Bruce Byron
- carriage driver
- Elizabeth Eaton
- young Maria
- Elizabeth Earl
- young Julia
- Philip Sarson
- young Edmund
- Amelia Warner
- teenage Fanny
- Charles Edwards
- Yates
- Sophia Myles
- Susan
- Hilton McRae
- Mr Price
- Anna Popplewell
- Betsey
- Danny Worters
- boy with bird cart
- Gordon Reid
- Doctor Winthrop
- Jack Murphy
- Peter Curtis
- Emma Flett
- Wendy Woodbridge
- ballroom dancers
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Buena Vista International (UK)
- 10,094 feet
- 112 minutes 10 seconds
- Dolby digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe