HardToPlease

The DVD packaging describes this movies as a thriller, and as if to underline that, shows a picture of helicopters circling an exploding van while a guy with a gun runs away.

This movie is not a thriller, and there are no explosions or helicopters. (What was that on the packaging? Clip art?) When I'm in the mood for explosions and helicopters, it's a disappointment to bring home a movie that instead has as its big moments someone breaking down a door or fingerprinting someone.

This movie is a rambling, disjointed drama. It wasn't completely awful, but was like real life in that the story doesn't completely make sense and doesn't work artistically. (And if they'd shown one more Casablanca-esquire foggy airfield, I'd have screamed.) It's just a bunch of confusing stuff that happens, and then other stuff happens, and who cares about any of those people? And we spent the first 45 minutes trying to tell the various dark-haired women apart. Or maybe they were all the same woman. Still don't know.

Warning: If you're someone who enjoys Jane Austen in a literary way -- someone who knows about the manners and language of the time and who knows the specific language of Austen's books as well as you know the Beatitudes or the Lord's Prayer -- you will heartily dislike this adaptation. (What's with Mr. Bingley coming into the room where Jane is lying in bed? A gentleman like Mr. Bingley wouldn't be paying calls on a woman who was in bed.) If you're going to change the style, manners, and language of a story that much, you make "West Side Story," not "Romeo and Juliet Badly Done."

The dresses were unflattering to Ms. Knightley -- she looked about the way Mary is usually depicted, with a washboard chest called attention to by an unflattering neckline. A Wonderbra would have done, well, wonders. And Mr. Bennet hardly even looked like a gentleman, much less a gentleman with a subtle sense of humor. Does he not have a man to shave him before he goes to the ball?

There were some good aspects, of course, most particularly the way everything wasn't all nicey-nice. Places that are often depicted rather too beautifully in other productions were depicted more realistically: crowded, not-quite-clean assemblies, women without makeup looking about the way a woman without makeup looks when she's been dancing strenuously for half an hour in a hot room. I thought the Bennets' home was a little too "Martha Stewart Does Distressed Surfaces," though, and that one shade of blue on walls and woodwork kept screaming "Look! The designer researched the typical home colors of the day and almost got it right."

If, however, you're the kind of Austen fan who merely likes Austen-ish movies and you don't know her work as literature, well, go for it. It could be worse.