Opens November 18, 1999

Apparently, British purists are up in arms over director Patricia Rozema's treatment of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. And they have a point. Rozema has crafted a sensual, irreverent and perhaps too modern exploration of Jane Austen's England. In any case, it's certainly not the Austen we remember from school. Worse yet, in reinventing Austen's most audacious novel, Rozema has her own political agenda. She wants us to see Austen as she's never been seen before. Frankly, I liked her just fine the way she was.

Perhaps the biggest gamble -- one of the few that pays off -- is Rozema's interpretation of Austen's repressed and anguished heroine Fanny Price. Rozema drew extensively from Austen's own writings, making this new Fanny (as a child: Hannah Taylor Gordon; as an adult: Frances O'Connor) into a girl more akin to Austen herself than to the original character she wrote. In fact, she is downright spunky, and it's a good thing she is -- she has a difficult road ahead. When Fanny first comes to Mansfield Park as the "poor relation" to the wealthy Bertram family, she's is constantly reminded by Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter) of her inferiority to her well-bred cousins Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), Tom (James Purefoy), Julia (Justine Waddell) and Maria (Victoria Hamilton).

As always, Austen's abhorrence of social status plays a major role in the film, revealing a time when one's name meant everything. Yet, Rozema chooses to play it up even more, giving the film a brooding quality that seems ill-placed. Poor Fanny is treated more as a servant than an equal, and it's this isolation that leads her to look inside herself, writing fanciful stories that express her headstrong nature. This impetuousness attracts the interest of Edmund, who becomes her friend and confidante as she grows up into a young woman. But Edmund is torn by his attraction to Fanny, who he struggles unsuccessfully to see as his equal, and instead turns his attentions to the sensual Mary Crawford (Embeth Davidtz), who has just recently arrived in the country with her dashing rake of a brother Henry (Alessandro Davola).

Mary and Henry quickly shake up Mansfield Park's staid atmosphere with their sexual charades. While Mary toys with Edmund, Henry pursues the reticent Fanny, who finds herself the toast of society after receiving his affections. When Henry finally proposes to Fanny, she is torn by her own love for Edmund and her overwhelming terror of poverty. It's this very modern theme - the choice between love and money - that governs everything these characters do and finally leads both Fanny and Edmund to admit their adoration of each other, regardless of the consequences.

In the film, Rozema wanted to avoid the standard interpretation of Jane Austen as "one, long garden party." Her answer is to push a lot of buttons by embracing the sexuality of the characters and exploring the political elements of the era. It doesn't work. Instead of a seething undercurrent of passion and turmoil, Rozema puts it in our face. Mary Crawford and her brother Henry are strutting examples of human pheromones and there's also an ill-placed focus on the slave trade, which was on the periphery of the novel but plays a major and awkward role in the film. Instead of approaching the story with the drawing room comedy aesthetic that makes Austen so delightful, Rozema has created a world more in line with the intrigue of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

The fact is that Rozema has taken the fun out of Austen's work, abandoning the light-heartedness that has drawn fans to her again and again. Being so focused on its message makes the film is positively boring at points. And it doesn't help that Rozema has designed the film to be so spare -- a chair here, a table there -- that she takes away the lushness that makes period pieces so visually appealing.

Now, I'm the first person to stand up and cheer when a director plays with genre conventions, but only when they work. Here, the gambles don't quite pay off. In trying to cast Austen in a new light, Rozema has taken away what makes her so delightful. In trying to be "thoroughly modern," she alienates us from the era. Austen's language still rings true in the hands of some very capable actors, but in the end, the journey isn't worth the trip. Instead of being a charming period soap opera, Mansfield Park is a soap box from which Rozema seeks to lecture and enlighten us.