Class Act

Reviewed - Pride & Prejudice: Keira Knightely & Co do justice to Jane Austen's timeless tale, writes Michael Dwyer

BIRDS are chirping and a piano tinkles on the soundtrack as Elizabeth Bennet studiously reads a book while walking through a beautifully burnished field in the opening scene of Pride & Prejudice. The scene exudes the whiff of yet another off-the-peg frock flick from the BritLit heritage industry, and the feeling that we've been here so many times before.

We have, of course. There have been five TV versions, a forgettable Bollywood treatment (Bride and Prejudice) and all those knowing references in the Bridget Jones movies. Jane Austen's wise and wonderful novel has proved hugely influential on countless films in terms of theme and structure. However, the only other cinema treatment of the original material dates back to 1940, when actors in their mid-30s - Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier - played the complicated young lovers, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy.

Joe Wright's enthralling new film gets back to basics, rooting the story in both realism and serious comedy, directly addressing the rigid class divisions of late-18th-century England without ever labouring the point, expressing the era's extreme formalities of language and gesture with elan, and casting actors around the same age as Austen's protagonists originally were.

At 20, Keira Knightley is the definitive Elizabeth Bennet, precisely catching her in all her feistiness and sensitivity and exhibiting star quality that recalls Princess Diana when the doe-eyed Knightley looks up from downcast eyes. As the aloof, emotionally repressed Darcy, Matthew Macfayden subtly captures the changes in a man when, for the first time in a life of deeply ingrained order, love overtakes his impulses and exposes his own vulnerability.

Wright surrounds them with an impeccably chosen cast that notably includes two inveterate scene-stealers, Brenda Blethyn as the amusingly scatty Mrs Bennet, whose sole mission in life is finding suitable suitors for her five daughters, and Judi Dench as the imperious snob, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose withering gaze could lay waste to Hyde Park.

Finally, and crucially, this is an Austen adaptation freed from the limitations imposed by television and making maximum use of cinema's potential to refresh its ripe material on a broad, handsome canvas.