Marital arts: Pride & Prejudice reviewed in 2005

Keira Knightley can sometimes cut a chilly, rigid figure on screen, but she’s never exuded more warmth and confidence than as Lizzy Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. She perfectly embodies what Jane Austen characterised as Lizzy’s “lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous”. As previously, Knightley’s crinkly-nosed grin and sceptical brow leave the impression that she’s caught a funny scent. And something’s certainly rotten in English society at the end of the 18th century, when the Bennet family’s failure to produce a male heir means that their estate won’t go to Lizzy and her sisters but to a priggish distant relative, and when the only ability that counts in young women is marriageability – even for a sharp, ironical girl who likes to walk and read a book at the same time.

Working Title’s new version of Austen’s novel follows five television versions (most famously, the hugely successful six-hour BBC miniseries with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle) and the 1940 film adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, not to mention Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary variation and last year’s Bollywood spin Bride & Prejudice. Austen’s marriage comedy has become something of a jukebox standard, a timeless fairy tale streaked with real desperation, in which the gates to the filthy-rich fortress swing wide – after a couple of close calls – for a pair of shabby-genteel sisters who want love but need safety and somehow get both.

This latest rendition distinguishes itself from the pack largely through evocative cinematography and production design. Director Joe Wright (who helmed the Bafta-winning miniseries Charles II the Power & the Passion) and director of photography Roman Osin pan lovingly through the Bennet home, a scuffed and sunken pile where vegetation is amiably taking over the brickwork and livestock chatters at the margins. The Netherfield ball scene is the film’s splendid centre piece: the camera dollies through crowds as conversations overlap and figures major, minor and anonymous wander in and out of the picture. Presented with these long takes and bustling frames, the eye is free – or rather compelled – to roam where it pleases, like one of the bedazzled guests. As it builds in melodramatic momentum, however, the film relies more and more on close-ups and the conventional rhythms of shot and reverse-shot – as in the fiery showdown between Lizzy and Mr Darcy.

Wright also coordinates a delightfully cohesive cast: Brenda Blethyn has been playing variations of the shrill, blowzy Mrs Bennet for years; Knightley’s final scene with Donald Sutherland (as the Bennet patriarch) coaxes ungrudging tears; Jena Malone sustains a giddy sugar rush as the twittering birdie Lydia; and Tom Hollander’s tum as the repellent Mr Collins borders on the selfless. As Darcy, Matthew Macfadyen is appropriately sullen and vaguely queasy in his early scenes, later achieving a taut push-and-pull of flirtatious passive-aggression with Knightley. When a caped Darcy materialises on the horizon out of the Lake District fog, the preview audience giggled, but it sounded like the laughter of affectionate familiarity.