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Jane Austen Adaptations and the Problem with Casting
6 responses to “Jane Austen Adaptations and the Problem with Casting”
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As you suggest, attractiveness is such an individual taste thing, and can relate to character as well as to features/figure. I often find people attractive in real life that most people don’t (and vice-versa!)… One fault of some Regency/Austen adaptations, imho – this might be just me – is that of making the male characters rather TOO pretty and perfectly turned-out. But then, millions of women must be cool with that. XAlice
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“I also desperately want a Fanny Price who fades into the background.” You mean like Billie Piper?! :-p Soooo miscast. She looked like she might take you out back and give you a thrashing!
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I love Billie Piper but Fanny Price she is not! She looks way too healthy and bouncy to play the quiet, timid, and chronically ill Fanny Price
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Exactly. She’s not doormat. More like a speedbump! She’d have no problem telling Aunt Norris where to go!
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I see what you mean. The characters that aren’t the main ones deserve to be noticed too! Although I can’t see anyone but Colin or Matthew being Mr Darcy!😍
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BD…You are spot on. That noted, the problem is that, as a visual medium constrained to approximately two hours, film and streaming must be shorthand and simplified (for those who have not read through the Canon multiple times). Characterizations that we authors can spend two pages developing in a variation must be accomplished in thirty seconds of screen time.
Directors rely on societal norms that allow audiences to quickly pigeonhole a character and ascribe traits commonly assumed to be borne by such persons. For instance, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed man in a pre-WWII epic, even without the German lilt to his English, will not surprise the audience by later showing up in a black SS uniform in the back seat of a convertible Mercedes. He has already been pegged as a member of the Master Race. Everything he does throughout the film is an outgrowth of that visual.
That’s why I see the deft use of actors like Wise as the villain to be masterful. There is a surprise hidden beneath his good, but not astonishingly good, looks. That’s where Emma Thompson’s script found the essential Austen: men can be dangerous, whether too beautiful, too ugly, or too normal…a woman can fall prey to any of them if they exercise the power men held over women in the Regency. Or as Jane might have written: a good man is hard to find.
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