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By Andrea Thompson
I don’t want to meet the woman who doesn’t love Jane Austen. Many may adore her for the wrong reasons, but she deserves the accolades. With the film adaptation of “Mansfield Park” back on Netflix, it gave me an opportunity to delve into what is for me her most fascinating work, just as a miniseries based on her unfinished novel “Sandition” airs on PBS, and a new “Emma” movie hits theaters next month.
That I find “Mansfield Park” fascinating doesn’t make it my favorite Austen novel by any means. Of all her published works, it isn’t just the only one that could be drastically changed in a modern adaptation, it needs to be. The heroine Fanny Price, with all her passivity, timidity, and priggishness, would not suit today’s audiences, even if she’s depicted with great complexity, even a certain amount of irony. She’s also pretty much always right, which makes her potential to annoy even greater.
With all that, I can’t be unhappy with the changes the 1999 film “Mansfield Park” made to its source material. The words luminous presence gets thrown around a lot, but it’s still the best way to describe Frances O’Connor’s portrayal of the adult Fanny Price, who is sent by her impoverished family to live with her wealthier relations at their titular estate as a child. Patricia Rozema, who directed and wrote the film, isn’t trying to be faithful to the novel, but she does make a bold choice with Fanny’s love interest Edmund (Johnny Lee Miller), who’s also her cousin. Different times is another phrase that gets thrown a lot, but still...eew. Rozema keeps their familial status unchanged, and Miller plays Edmund with such compassion that you’ll get over the ick factor pretty quick.
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Their relationship is also a lot less creepy, with Edmund and Fanny being the same age and interacting as equals, rather than the timid, six-years-younger Fanny depending on him as a protector from her more inconsiderate relatives. Rozema also places even more emphasis on the female characters by eliminating Fanny’s brother William, another close, loving relationship of hers who was also a major plot device. Instead, it’s Fanny’s sister Susan (Sophia Myles) with whom she shares a close bond, despite being separated from her for years. Fanny’s letters to Susan and her writing ambitions are also the impetus for much of Fanny’s direct-to-camera narration.
Fanny’s interactions with Mary Crawford (Embeth Davidtz), her rival for Edmund’s affections, also have strong lesbian undertones, which would be anachronistic at best or exploitative at worst in the hands of a filmmaker less capable than Rozema, who instead imbues them with a vitality and naturalism that’s a kind of counter to the hetero dream world of the 1995 “Pride and Prejudice” miniseries. Taken on its surface, Mary and her brother, the swoonworthy Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola), would be the seductive, worldly Londoners who corrupt the morality of the sedate English countryside, but both Austen and Rozema know hypocrisy has no borders or boundaries.
Ethics were in short supply long before the Crawfords arrived anyway, given that the Bertram fortune is built upon slavery and colonialism from their estates in Antigua. If Austen subtly (to modern eyes) alludes to it, Rozema ensures that the slaves who fueled much of the world’s economy are very much present, even if they are kept as off-screen as they most likely were during this time period, forcibly removed from those who profited from their forced labor and wanted no reminders of it. In Fanny, Rozema even draws a kind of parallel between them, and how disposable and vulnerable she is. People think nothing of sending Fanny away, either from her birth family or her adopted one, or marrying her off at will to a wealthy, untrustworthy suitor, although thankfully she doesn’t fully equate their experiences.
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Not that the other women have it much better, even those with wealth and status. Lindsay Duncan plays a double role as Fanny’s mother, the haggard Mrs. Price and Mansfield matriarch Lady Bertram. The former chose the wrong man, one who never made a fortune and turned out to be a cad, stranding her in poverty and degradation. The latter has a comfortable home and life, but is also a drug addict who mostly spends her days in a languid, laudanum-induced daze. Fanny’s cousin Maria Bertram (Victoria Hamilton) chooses wealth over love, only to discover she’s trapped herself in a gilded cage.
It’s Mary Crawford, though, who remains one of Austen’s most enjoyable, complicated characters. Like her brother Henry, she’s seductive, flirtatious, and charismatic, and disdains conventional morality and religion in her role as obvious foil to the righteous Fanny. Mary is also capable of great kindness, often standing up for Fanny when she’s mistreated, and showing herself to be capable of change. The film mostly follows Austen’s lead, even when she is the only one to suspect Edmund is in love with Fanny, even if it’s ultimately harsher on her. In another time, Mary might have been an astute businesswoman, but as it is, she is condemned for her cold calculation and amorality after a scandal threatens the reputation of the Bertram family. But her cold analysis is also the catalyst for the family’s realization that they have reaped what they have sown.
The changes Rozema made won’t suit everyone, especially not Austen purists. But Rozema doesn’t just love Jane Austen, she also respects her, and that appreciation is what allows her to make such drastic changes while staying true to Austen’s voice, with all the wit and satire she was known for. To quote the film itself, “It could have turned out differently, I suppose. But it didn’t.”
