I first started thinking closely about the process of adaptation back in 1990, around the time I decided to branch out and add a fun major in English to my college coursework in psychology. A good friend, surprised at my lack of discrimination, convinced me to rein in my love of those films adapted from books. As she explained it, novels were the real thing--luminous originaries which celluloid could only ever dimly reflect. I only thought I was enjoying Steel Magnolias (1989) and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), and really should have read the books instead.

When A&E came out with their own adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice five years later, I and a number of other literature instructors were struck dumb by the mini-series' fidelity to the text. Not only had director Sim Langton and scriptwriter Andrew Davies included every minor character and plot thread from Austen's second published novel, but they and stars Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle had accurately captured the author's characteristic combination of drama and wit, seriousness and humor. The series was so good I served generous portions of it to my secondary students to prompt close readings of the text, and, once it came out on DVD, shared our copy with friends and family whenever possible.

It is extremely rare for cinema to capture so faithfully the tone, character dynamics, and plot minutiae of a canonical nineteenth-century novel. Nothing comparable exists for any of the Brontë sisters' work: every adaptation of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights has heavily abridged the storyline and abandoned numerous secondary characters. Likewise, few filmmakers updating novels by George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, or William Thackeray have hesitated to modify the mores and emotions of their source material's characters. Set against such pervasively loose practice, the 1995 version of Austen's Pride and Prejudice stood out as a pleasant curiosity.

In the months before Joe Wright's more recent Pride & Prejudice (2005) hit theaters, I once again heard friendly murmuring warning me against cinematic translations. Langton's version had been a celluloid diamond in a rough and very vast wasteland of bad adaptations--nothing could match it. This new version, I was told, would have Austen's corpse doing back flips under the black slab that marks her grave in Winchester Cathedral. Some friends took aim at the film's audacious brevity (2 hrs, 7 minutes), others at the presumably miscast Keira Knightley (who plays central character Elizabeth Bennet), and a few at the film's rumored alterations to those textual elements it actually managed to retain. I overheard a couple Austen aficionados threatening to avoid the film altogether.

And then I saw it myself on our home screen, about a year after my wife had seen it in the theater.

And I preferred it to the book.

Now, before your collective gasps suck all the air out of the room, allow me a few lines to explain. I firmly believe that one of the key reasons for Jane Austen's continued popularity lies in her highly accessible brand of humor--a type of comedy most fully expressed in the novel on which Wright's film is based. Like some of the better Restoration playwrights before her and Charles Dickens after her, Austen is quite willing to flatten certain characters into two-dimensional archetypes to make them more derisible or more laughable. Pride and Prejudice (1813) includes the duplicitous womanizer Mr. Wickham, the arrogant and self-absorbed Caroline Bingley, and the silly and flirtatious Lydia Bennet--self-absorbed characters whose bad behavior drives the plot forward. Austen's cast also includes the less necessary but highly amusing trio of Mr. Collins, a self-centered, emotionally myopic, and ridiculous fop preoccupied with winning some slight regard from his wealthy patroness; Mrs. Bennet, a pushy, loud, and indecorous matron whose child-like behavior has earned her the disdain of her more judicious daughters and long-suffering husband; and the young Mary Bennet, a fifth sister and fifth wheel whose paltry piano skills and dry attempts at epigrammatic wisdom succeed only at making the reader cackle painfully.

Now, much as I appreciate Austen's prowess at making me snicker, I have a constitutional preference for novels that encourage me to sympathize. I'd much rather be asked to identify with a host of more realistic and complex than be forced to laugh at half of them, and Austen's novel does not give me this option.

Joe Wright's adaptation does.

Wright telegraphs his bold intent to delve beneath the surface in the opening scene when, upon finishing a favorite novel, Elizabeth crosses the lawn and enters the house through its unassuming bowels. Instead of sweeping into an immaculately kept house through a grand entrance surrounded by imposing columns, then taking a seat in the type of well-lit and handsomely decorated sitting room we have grown to associate with Regency period pieces, our heroine walks through past noisy cattle and steps over a gaggle of geese, passes under rows of hanging laundry, and glances at the servants elbow-deep in the day's wash (servants almost always remain invisible in Austen's novels). The camera then moves past Elizabeth into a darkened hallway, rests briefly on a dining room spottily lit by the natural light from a few narrow windows, passes over a table covered with undergarments and a mess of ribbons and the hats they have been made to adorn, and moves out onto a porch marked by weather-spotted banisters and crumbling stonework. As the musical score fades and the dialogue begins, the camera settles on Elizabeth, now flanked by three sisters eager to overhear the story's opening conversation between their parents. The young women's faces and necks are lightly soiled, their hair unkempt, and their entire persons unevenly lit. Wright unhesitatingly captures the vibrant, messy pulse of young life in the English countryside, unafraid that rendering his heroines au naturelle might somehow discourage a modern audience from identifying with them.

Instead of placing Austen's narrative inside an ornate frame, then highlighting or shading various characters according to the rubric prescribed by the author, Wright's film draws us alongside even the most ridiculous characters and dares us to reject any of them as mere fops or frails. Mrs. Bennet, the first and most ridiculous target in Austen's novel, becomes much more sympathetic: Wright ties her concern about the girls' finding husbands directly to her fear that they will become penniless when her husband dies and their cousin Mr. Collins inherits the estate. The film's highlighting of the Bennet girls' likely fate also softens the edges Austen originally placed around Mary; her overt rejection of balls and the frivolity of her sisters begins to resemble less the bothersome commentary of a killjoy and more the practical wisdom of a plain-faced girl unsure of her marriage prospects. Mr. Bennet's interactions with these three characters humanize them still further: he kisses his wife warmly in the opening scene (one cannot imagine such shows of affection in the novel), fails to make fun of Mr. Collins (though he still thinks him an unsuitable husband for Elizabeth), and comforts a crying Mary after embarrassing her at the ball (he has asked her to stop playing the piano).

And so it goes, through to the film's conclusion. Wright's iteration is, in a word, "honest." It may not be faithful to Austen's vision, but sometimes textual fidelity matters less than psychological realism.