Shaun de Waal
MOVIE OFTHEWEEK
It was Edward Said who, in his book Culture and Imperialism, pointed to an aspect of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park that had not been much remarked upon. It was slavery.
Such a heavy issue may seem at odds with the sequestered world of Jane Austen, who compared her own work to delicate carving on a narrow band of ivory. In her major novels, a refined comedy of sensibility is exquisitely and lightly deployed to tell intricate, intimate stories revolving around the fidgety business of love and marriage among the gentry of 200 years ago. Austen’s heroines learn to make fine moral distinctions and come to self-knowledge as they work out which man will make them the best match.
The heroine in this case is Fanny Price (Frances O’Connor), who is sent from her impoverished family home in Plymouth to live with her aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas (Harold Pinter) and Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan) at Mansfield Park. They are much better off than her parents, and relocation to this stately home offers Fanny a better life than the one she would have had in Plymouth. The downside is that she will be treated as the poor relation, and will always be something of an outsider in this family.
Yet, as she grows up and complicated romantic affiliations develop in the Bertram household, Fanny is proved to be the one with the clearest moral vision (and thus the greatest hope of personal happiness). There is a great deal of confusion around matches and marriages, played out like a highly involved formal dance, which encompasses Fanny’s female cousins Maria (Victoria Hamilton) and Julia (Justine Waddell), her male cousins Tom (James Purefoy) and Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), as well as the charming and slightly outr brother-sister pair of Mary and Henry Crawford (Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola), who come to stay in the grounds of Mansfield Park. Fanny is the one who discerns appearance from reality, who stands for her deepest feelings against social pressure, and is rewarded with true love.
But director and screenwriter Patricia Rozema is not content with this romantic gavotte alone. Whether or not she has read Culture and Imperialism, she appears to have taken a leaf from Said’s book and brought slavery to the fore of the story. I think this is legitimate. The novel itself gestures towards this gap in the text when Fanny asks Sir Thomas about the slaves he owns on his Antigua plantation, and gets in reply “such a dead silence”.
And, after all, financial considerations are at the heart of the problem of who shall marry whom; this is a constant counterpoint in Austen’s novels to the workings out of affairs of the heart. Subtle gradations of class are germane, too, so the matter of the savage economic reality of the “black cargo” underpinning the genteel life of Mansfield Park is a relevant expansion of the novel’s story. In purely narrative terms, though, it must be said that there is no real way to resolve the issue, short of Fanny’s becoming a committed abolitionist.
Rozema doesn’t go that far, but her importations do deepen – and darken – the movie. Besides the slavery, she makes significant changes to the protagonist some have found hardest to like in Austen’s oeuvre, one who at times seems as though she were better named Fanny Priss. Drawing on Austen’s letters and earliest fictional attempts, which are often wildly imaginative, she enriches Fanny’s inner life and thereby makes her a more interesting personality.
THE AUSTRALIAN O’CONNOR RISES MAGNIFICENTLY TO THE TASK OF MAKING THIS WOMAN REAL AND SYMPATHETIC; WE WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE SEEING MORE OF THIS SENSITIVE AND PERSONABLE PERFORMER. THE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE CAST ARE GOOD, TOO, ESPECIALLY DAVIDTZ IN THE MORE AMBIVALENT ROLE OF MARY CRAWFORD. IT IS PINTER, THOUGH, WHO, ALMOST UNNOTICED, STEALS THE SHOW AS SIR THOMAS, THE DOUR DISCIPLINARIAN WITH SHAFTS OF KINDNESS, THE UPRIGHT ENGLISH GENTLEMAN AND SLAVE- OWNER.