Mansfield Park (1999)

Mansfield Park
Directed by Patricia Rozema
Written by Patricia Rozema from a novel by Jane Austin
1999/UK
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Edmund Bertram: There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.

The late 1990s was prime time for Jane Austen adaptations. Here is an interesting one.

The Ward family had three beautiful daughters. The most beautiful of all, a complete airhead, married into the nobility becoming Lady Charles Bertram, another married a clergyman who received the parsonage on the Bertram estate and became a confirmed meddler known as Mrs. Norris. The final daughter married a sailor of low character named Price for love and produced nine children. Our heroine Fanny Price (Frances O’Connor) is the eldest of these.

Childless busybody Mrs. Norris suggests that Fanny be taken off the Prices’ hands and raised to be a gentlewoman. She grows up with the four Bertram children but is always treated as an inferior. The only one of her cousins with any sense or brains is Edmund. Fanny develops feelings for him but knows this is hopeless.

Into this milieu come dastardly scoundrels Mary and Henry Crawford, who attempt to seduce and corrupt Edmund and Fanny respectively. With Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas Bertram.

This adaptation strays fairly far afield from the novel. Here, Fanny is an aspiring writer, an obvious stand in for Jane Austen, and has quite the witty tongue unlike the humble and priggish character in the novel. The lighter tone here actually improved Austin’s most moralistic novel at least for me. I found this version much better than the 2007 TV movie.