Fanny Price and Henry Crawford are the two characters most betrayed by this film's screenwriters. To put it simply, Fanny is much too vibrant. As her sister Suzie notes, Fanny's "tongue is sharper than the blade of a guillotine," an accurate description of a strangely inappropriate characteristic given the heroine by the filmmakers. Jane Austen's Fanny is reserved and nervous, and though she speaks many sound words they are never uttered in a clever way. In the novel, Fanny is portrayed as an avid reader; the film adds to this hobby the related one of writing. (I suppose Edward's support of her private profession and the fact he gets her stories published is supposed to appeal to modern women.) Henry Crawford's character, on the other hand, is not expanded but narrowed. The movie fails to capture Henry's charming power over women and how slimy and devious he turns out to be.

Though my previous experience with film adaptations should have numbed me, I was shocked by the changes to the plot. Fanny's brother, William, is completely eliminated and replaced by Suzie. In the novel, William is Fanny's closest sibling and plays an integral part in the story. Fanny's desire to wear to a dance the amber cross given her by William provides the catalyst for the debacle in which Fanny is saved from wearing the cross on a necklace given her by Henry (through Mary) by Edward's having bought her one. In the book, Henry also arranges for William to receive a promotion in the Navy, an event that causes Fanny's change of heart towards the previously suspicious suitor. Her warming up to Henry in the film, by contrast, is abrupt and without exaplanation.

The theme of slavery, only tangentially alluded to in the novel, becomes a central motif in the film. In the film's opening, Fanny notices a ship full of screaming slaves during her trip to Mansfield Park. It is made very obvious that the family lives off the profits of slavery, and is suggested that Tom's disagreement with his father over the use of slaves causes his rift with the family. In the novel, Tom falls out of favor with his father because he is an irresponsible, pleasure-seeking youth. Other elaborations of the slavery theme follow. Later in the movie, Fanny finds Tom's disturbing artwork about slaves; Sir Thomas Bertram catches sight of the book and burns it in a rage. Fanny also exclaims to Edmund at a critical moment that she will "not be sold like one of [his] father's slaves"--a reference to Henry's marriage proposal.

A Perhaps the most egregious change occurs in the manner by which we discover Mary and Henry's affair. In the film, Fanny finds them naked together in a scene Austen would never have dreamed of including in her fiction.

Unfortunately, this adaptation has decided to suggest over and over again that the kind of lifestyle normally captured by Austen in her novels--that of the landed wealthy during Regency England--is pretty boring, and that modern sociopolitical twists better serve the narrative than the author's trademark wit and humor.

by Agata Pelka