JoyOfMovies.com: Movie Review of Mansfield Park

"Mansfield Park": a two-pronged review
By Amanda L. Caldwell
Just a note to those who are about to set off on the fabulous journey that is my review of "Mansfield Park": I'm going to compare the movie with the book. You do not need to have read the book, because I will tell you everything you need to know. It will help you if you have seen the movie, or at least either read the book or seen the movie. If you have done neither, frankly I'm not sure why you'd want to read this. But, in the interests of being generally obliging, here is a short plot summary for the clueless: Fanny Price, oldest daughter in a family of numerous offspring and limited means, is sent off to live with her uncle, aunt, and cousins - the Bertrams. Fanny is never quite accepted as one of the family and is half a servant, always a charity case. The only character who truly likes her is her cousin Edmund. Newcomers to the area, Henry and Mary Crawford, brother and sister, seek to liven things up. Only Fanny holds herself partially distant from the charming influences of these suave city folk, as they seduce the other characters one by one.
I recently read Mansfield Park the novel for the first time. It was the second to last of the Jane Austen novels I had left to read. I was bummed after finishing them off, because Jane hasn't come out with anything new for years and doesn't seem likely to any time soon.
The last of her novels I read was Northanger Abbey, and when I saw posters and scattered ads for "Mansfield Park" the movie, I kept getting the two novels confused in my head. The movie ads looked much too cheerful for the Mansfield Park novel I'd read, and now I know why.
The change in tone has mostly to do with the main character of Fanny Price. Fanny in the book is a static character, sickly, timid, retiring. In a 1966 essay by Tony Tanner on Mansfield Park the novel, Tanner says the point is to contrast the never-changing Fanny with the evil influences in the film, particularly the outsider Crawfords who whisk in, singing the adulation of progress. They try to move things along in the quiet Park, and in doing so, they put into motion the wrecking of many lives. Fanny stays put, her modesty reflecting a quietness of spirit and a superiority of judgment.
Tanner writes: "As Edmund says: 'Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout, who has been consistent.' She prefers custom and habit to novelty and innovation, and her resolute immobility, frail and beset though it is, is a last gesture of resistance against the corrosions of unfettered impulse and change. ... Her immobility, her refusal to be 'moved' are not symptoms of mule-like stubbornness or paralysed fear, but a measure of her integrity, her adherence to her own clear evaluation of how things stand."
The other characters in the novel are lured by "unfettered impulse and change." Some resist, but many meet with disaster. Indeed, no other Austen novel is quite so forceful or blunt in the sins its characters commit. Most Austen tragedies involve secret engagements or unwise elopements, hardly crimes in this day and age, but this one deals with issues including divorce and adultery - not what most commonly associate with proper Jane.
And the movie version didn't stop there - it threw in even more sins, these ones societal rather than personal. They added a subplot involving Fanny's uncle's involvement in slavery and his older son's deep aversion to the practice. It's not at all something that Austen would write about, but it does give the movie some social depth that's unexpected for an Austen-adapted film. There's plenty of character depth in her novels, but she doesn't pass the boundaries of her fictional country towns.
Austen's novels tend to deal also with a narrow range of social classes, only from upper middle class to the very rich. Servants are generally mentioned only by being yelled at by the hurrying mama. The very poor are visited, but the visits last a paragraph or so, with more telling than showing, such as this from Emma, describing one of the young, rich title character's customary visits to nearby villagers: "[Emma] understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those, for whom education had done so little ... . In the present instance, it was sickness and poverty together which she came to visit; and after remaining there as long as she could give comfort or advice, she quitted the cottage ... ." And this is what Emma herself has to say about lower classes a few steps up: "A young farmer, whether on horseback or on foot, is the very last sort of person to raise my curiosity. The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as much above my notice as in every other he is below it." I have to put in a word for Austen: She shows by another character's words that Emma's attitude toward the farmer in question is ill-formed. Still, in general, the poor, even when respected, are generally only a foil to the important characters and are easily dismissed.
The movie by contrast enlarges Austen's narrow social scale. Fanny feels out of place in both the movie and book because she's poorer than her cousins. In the movie, Fanny's parents' home is a dim hovel running over with maggots and scurrying cockroaches. But in the novel, we know that the family's not well off because when Fanny goes to visit as a young adult, the servants are lazy. Horror! Giving more range to the social differences in the movie made it somewhat more interesting to us jaded suburbanites. A middle-class person in a rich person's house is just not as startling, and it made Fanny's desire to stay with the wealthy but idle and potentially wicked Bertrams more understandable.
In some ways, though, I understand Austen's tendency to stay within her familiar social circle and not deal (in writing, at least) with classes she didn't live in and didn't understand. We often speak of Christians needing to leave their comfort zone - generally in the sense of living with those poorer, not the other way around - but is that a universally Christian command? We can always look to Jesus' example on earth - he made friends with prostitutes, lepers, and tax collectors (the last rich but outcast), and we can imagine that this was not normal behavior for people in his social circle. But it might not have been as big a jump for him, since he was poor and homeless - an outcast -- already. I've been thinking about this because Steve and I are living in a neighborhood right now that's slightly outside our comfort zone, and sometimes - we're uncomfortable. As someone who loves to move around and try out new places, I often have trouble understanding "normal" people, who grow up in one place, go to school there, move into a place near their parents, and stay there until they die. But I'm finding that I, too, have limits on how much variety I want in life, and I struggle with whether it's Christlike to want to keep to my own safe ethnic, class and religious boundaries. I guess in the end I have to admit there probably isn't one doctrine for each person - God calls each believer to live in a certain place and time, and all my responsibility is, as Jesus told Peter, is to follow him.
Anyway ... those are the social-issue differences between the movie and the book, and now back to the character of Fanny Price, the biggest change in the movie. Fanny, as I said, is a shy and retiring character in the novel, a character that some Austen fans love to hate. (To see what I mean, read "The definitive Fanny-bashing." This funny description, filched from The Screwtape Letters, is from the Jane Austen info page, www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeinfo.html, where you'll find plenty of food for discussion. Same for the hosting site, www.pemberley.com.) Fanny in the movie is much more like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, or like Jane Austen herself. Indeed, the movie "Mansfield Park" says it's based on the novel by the same name plus Jane Austen's personal writings. Movie Fanny's The History of England by a partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian is 15-year-old Jane's own work, written to amuse her family. Austen, by all accounts, was a witty and gracious companion. You can see why the filmmakers veered toward making their heroine a little more sparkling.
So we have the warring Fannys, the sickly one of the novel, the spunky tomboy of the movie, and which wins? Frankly, I like the movie Fanny better - I respect pious, withering heroines but I don't enjoy them much. (Though I wouldn't go as far as this list of seven ways the story should change.) So it's not true to the original work, and maybe some would say it makes the novel suffer thematically, and maybe I would too if I'd ever really studied the novel, in a class or whatnot (lit major and general purist that I am), and this is a very long sentence, but anyway, I like Punky-power Fanny better. I've disagreed on this sort of subject with Austen before, who felt Pride and Prejudice, published before Mansfield Park, was too light and happy. What's wrong with light and happy, I say?
Speaking of happy, the ending in Austen's novel, though tidy and moral - good people receive good, the wicked go to h-e-double-hockeysticks - was not even close to being romantic. The movie did a primo job of making sparks fly between the heroine and her hero. Austen often deflates at the end of her characters' courtship - you get ending scenes like:
"I must say, Miss [insert name], I regret our past conflicts. Perhaps marriage is still an option?"
"I would not be opposed, sir."
"I am relieved though not surprised. Let's shake hands."
"Shall I now call you by your first name, sir?"
OK, not entirely, but there's certainly no necking. Every Austen movie I've seen has done better at creating sexual tension at the endings of her novels than Austen did - maybe she never French-kissed someone herself, who knows? She did remain a Miss Austen till her death, we know. Anyhow, "Mansfield Park" the movie does a good job of setting up the significant characters and continuing their story arc in such a way that the happy ending doesn't seem a grudging concession but a natural progression. Yea, movie!
So, in the end, I guess I would say that I enjoyed both the novel and the movie, and I wouldn't mind going through either again. The movie was well put-together, well-casted, and seriously funny in places. What interests me is that so much of the novel is changed for the movie and yet I didn't mind. If the changes are judicious and if you remember to take the movie on its own terms, not just as a repeat of the novel, it's easier to enjoy adaptations. It seemed this movie's changes were made judiciously, not arbitrarily tearing the novel to pieces but bringing out different issues, putting on its own slant to make it more resonant with a '90/00s audience. So Hollywood still hasn't made up for the Demi Moore "Scarlet Letter" -- it's paying down its debt.