Literary adaptation – Page 13

Sisters doing it for themselves. As I’m sure the film would have said in the dialogue if it had the guts.

Director: Burr Steers
Cast: Lily James (Elizabeth Bennet), Sam Riley (Fitzwilliam Darcy), Jack Huston (Wickham), Bella Heathcote (Jane Bennet), Douglas Booth (Mr. Bingley), Matt Smith (Mr. Collins), Charles Dance (Mr. Bennet), Lena Headey (Lady Catherine de Bourgh), Sally Phillips (Mrs. Bennet), Aisling Loftus (Charlotte Lucas)

Back in the 1990s, Harry Enfield and Chums did a sketch in which The Terminator (played by Martin Clunes) arrives in early 20th-century England, and spends a weekend at a country house searching for his victim. His violent antics are met with po-faced, stiff upper lip responses from the Upper Crust members of the household and uncomplaining reserve from the servants. It’s very funny. It sticks in the mind. It brilliantly mashes up costume drama with sci-fi drama. It’s five minutes long.

This film is effectively the same gag but stretched far beyond any possible welcome to an agonising 104 minutes, in which the same comic beat is repeated over and over again. “Oh look! Those posh girls/blokes in frocks are discussing tea and table arrangements! And now they are slaughtering a herd of zombies! While continuing the conversation! What larks!”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the poster child of a mercifully short-lived literary novelty: classic novels rewritten with genre elements. This trend also saw sea monsters inserted into Sense and Sensibility and hard-core sex scenes inserted into Jane Eyre (the worst of all, as the author had the cheek to suggest that Bronte would of course have got those scenes in if she could). It was a best-seller, but only in the sense that it was the ultimate ‘I-don’t-know-what-to-get-you-for-Christmas’ gag gift. But years after the moment had passed, the movie adaptation lumbered towards the big screen.

Morbid curiosity made me watch it (over several nights on Netflix, I hasten to add) and it’s exactly what it appears to be: a student sketch that is worthy of maybe a slight smile for the first few minutes, but then totally collapses the longer it goes on. Now I like Jane Austen films and I like zombie films but still I didn’t like this. Firstly it’s a terrible zombie film – the action moments are poorly shot and hard to follow, the action dull and the “laws” around the zombies in the movie are inconsistent (some zombies are super killers, others are lumbering brainless beasts). Secondly, all that Zombie stuff makes it a pretty bad Austen film. Worst of both worlds.

The Austen bits are (unsurprisingly) by far the best bits. There is a good cast here: Lily James and Matt Smith in particular would be very well cast in a proper adaptation. Anything interesting comes largely from Austen (the characters, the emotions, the bulk of the watchable stuff in the first half) anything dull from the source material (the zombies, the action, the final 30 minutes). The idea of society being fundamentally unchanged by a zombie invasion makes no sense at all (would money still be the driving factor in a world destroyed by the undead?). Much of the fighting involving the female characters has a slightly uncomfortable leering sexuality about it (“Look at those hot chicks pull knives from their undergarments! Phrroooaaahhh!!!!”) as well as being far too over choreographed.

Zombies is a pointless film of a forgotten fad. It’s one of the worst zombie films ever made. It wastes our chance to see some of these actors give decent performances in a proper adaptation. Pleasingly, it bombed catastrophically at the box office, probably because it appeals to no one: the zombie action isn’t anywhere good enough to interest the genre fan, the Austen fan is more likely to bung on their Firth/Ehle DVD than check this mess out. None of them are missing anything. Zombies isn’t the must-see abomination it needed to be to have any shelf life – it’s a blatant attempt to rake some more cash from a horse flogged to death. If you want to get a sense of it, save yourself 135 minutes and watch that Harry Enfield sketch instead. I guarantee you’ll laugh a heck of a lot more.

Nicole Kidman’s Oscar winning role produced a gallery of nose based puns, everyone convinced they could sniff out comedy gold

Director: Stephen Daldry
Cast: Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), Meryl Streep (Clarrisa Vaughan), Stephen Dillane (Leonard Woolf), Ed Harris (Richie Brown), Allison Janney (Sally Lester), Claire Danes (Julia Vaughan), Jeff Daniels (Louis Waters), John C Reilly (Dan Brown), Toni Collette (Kitty), Miranda Richardson (Vanessa Bell)

I remember when this film was released that it was garlanded with much praise as an intelligent and compassionate piece of filmmaking and a literate masterpiece. Well I’ve never seen it before and I have to say it holds up pretty well, even though it’s much more of a solid, impressive piece of professional film making than anything you might call a masterpiece.

The film covers three time periods each looking at one day in the life of three different women. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, the day we see encapsulates in microcosm the life of each women. So we have Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf struggling to deal with depression while working on Mrs.Dalloway; Julianne Moore as a depressed 1950s housewife trapped in a suburban marriage; finally Meryl Streep as an editor in the 200s who has dedicated her life to looking after a poet friend who is dying of AIDS.

Each of these three plot lines are carefully intercut with both sharp scriptwriting and patient direction (Hare and Daldry’s stage experience here is a real boon for a concept that is actually quite theatrical). Although the opening sequence of the film suggests we might be in for a dizzying series of intercuts (the time period in this sequence switches almost every shot) it soon settles down into some well structured conversation scenes, moving almost in a cycle from our plot lines to another and only rarely directly cutting mid scene from time line to time line.

Of the plot lines I found Meryl Streep’s more modern day plot the most engaging and that Streep’s performance as the patient martyr carried the heart of the film. This was despite Ed Harris’ overblown performance as the dying poet, one of those two scene cameos that draw far more praise than they deserve. But this story has a tragic simplicity and Streep brings a lifetime of vicarious hopes and dreams out from every beat of the day.

Nicole Kidman however won the notice and awards as Woolf. Well deserved as these notices were, this is a more traditional part with clearer “award worthy” acting moments. While these are excellently done (Stephen Dillane is terrific as Leonard Woolf), the Woolf parts don’t quite link with the two other plot lines and, for me, didn’t carry the same emotional force that the tragedy of normal lifes did in the later plot lines.

Julianne Moore also does great work as a depressed housewife who lacks the emotional articulacy to fully understand her feelings, though the decision to introduce a direct link between the 1950s and 1990s plot lines later in the film does mean that the Woolf plot line feels even more like a slightly disconnected story. But this section of the film crackles with claustrophobia and Moore demonstrates the confused sexuality below the surface of Americana.I feel like I’ve been hard on this film, which is a very professional piece of work with some great performances and some real emotional high points. There are some great cameos from classy actors like Toni Collette, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, John C Reilly, Claire Danes and Allison Janney. It also is a very sensitive exploration of the pressure sexuality and emotions can press on people – even in the 1990s where homosexuality isn’t a dirty secret, Streep’s character still has more than enough confused emotional hang ups to sort out.

It’s a very good film but it’s so professionally done and smoothly assembled, the acting so sharp and on the money, that I’m not sure if there is as much heart behind the scenes in its making than appears on screen.