Patricia Rozema takes some diabolical liberties with her perversely experimentalist, and frankly preposterous, reading of Mansfield Park. (There's one she didn't take, come to think of it - calling it "Jane Austen's Mansfield Park" in the Cliff's Notes Hollywood manner.)
In taking on the dullest, most emotionally reticent of Austen's novels, Rozema has the challenge of working with the most boring and priggish hero and heroine in English literature: poor-but-honest Fanny Price and bookish Edmund, the young man preparing to take holy orders in Mansfield Park, the sumptuous household where Fanny is taken in as a poor relation. Furthermore, Rozema has to deal with Austen's enigmatic hints about slavery and Mansfield Park's master Sir Thomas Bertram's plantation in Antigua.
She amplifies the genteel minuet of courtship in Austen's world into a raunchy, fully-fledged sex scene, and a little light gay flirting between Fanny and Mary Crawford. And, in line with the post-Edward Said orthodoxy in reading Mansfield Park, Austen's poor, narrow shoulders have to bear the weight of 21st-century analysis and guilt.
Rozema makes Fanny fully and explicitly aware of the source of Mansfield Park's wealth - but how, having made her aware, can our heroine do nothing without seeming complicit with slave ownership? Rozema's solution is to suggest that slavery is equivalent to a woman's position in marriage: a fallacious cop-out. It's very silly and PC, yet there are undeniably good performances all round, including an outstanding one from Harold Pinter, who lends his beautiful voice and compelling physical presence to the role of Sir Thomas Bertram.
