{"id":2575,"date":"2005-09-28T09:14:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-28T09:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/09\/steyn-on-bridges-pride-and-robert-wise\/"},"modified":"2005-09-28T09:14:00","modified_gmt":"2005-09-28T09:14:00","slug":"steyn-on-bridges-pride-and-robert-wise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/09\/steyn-on-bridges-pride-and-robert-wise.html","title":{"rendered":"Steyn on Bridges, Pride and Robert Wise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Mark Steyn, one of my favorite writers even when I disagree with him, has posted a few new film-related items to his website. One is a review of Clint Eastwood<\/a>\u2018s Bridges of Madison County<\/a><\/i> that he wrote for the Spectator<\/i> ten years ago:<\/span><\/p>\n

Meryl asks Clint to stay for dinner, and he lopes around the kitchen, man enough to help with the place settings and the washing up without being asked; never once does Meryl have to say, \u2018Go ahead, hunk. Take my tray.\u2019 We\u2019ve underestimated this last movie star, reckoning that if a man\u2019s good at gunplay he must be hopeless at foreplay. But that moment from In The Line Of Fire<\/i>, when Clint teasingly tinkles \u2018As Time Goes By\u2019 to Rene Russo, should have reminded us that the very apotheosis of Hollywood romance needed a tough guy: like Bogey, Eastwood is crossing the tracks. So the small talk grows smaller and the erotic charge more palpable and every tingle in their unhurried courtship crackles round the theatre like static electricity in Crimplene trousers. The audience is urging them on: \u2018Oh, God! Yes, yes!! Now!!!\u2019 we shriek silently.<\/p>\n

But Clint goes away, having laid nothing but the table. The sexual tension is wound ever tighter: he knows he wants her, but he also knows it will be all the sweeter if he waits till tomorrow\u2026 or next week\u2026 or maybe the sequel\u2026<\/p>\n

Movies pose as a stud\u2019s medium, but they\u2019re really for premature ejaculators: eyes meet across a bar, and next thing you know clothes are flying and sheets are crumpling and guitars are wailing, and that\u2019s it; they saw, they conquered, they came, all in three minutes. Eastwood\u2019s courage is in playing this seduction in real time. He is, technically, an OAP, and, when old-timers do movies, they\u2019re supposed to show they\u2019re just as funky as the young, like Don Ameche breakdancing in Cocoon<\/i>. But Clint\u2019s too cool for that stuff. In the slow-burn confidence of the dinner scene, he\u2019s signalling: there\u2019s some things we do better than you kids.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The other is a review of the brand-new Keira Knightley-starring version of Pride and Prejudice<\/a><\/i>, with a mini-obituary for Sound of Music<\/a><\/i> director Robert Wise thrown in at the end:<\/p>\n

. . . even in our present-tense culture, the latest Pride and Prejudice<\/i> seems to have turned up a little sooner than anybody needed it. It\u2019s a full decade since Colin Firth emerged from the lake in the BBC adaptation and I suppose to the young person his name may evoke only the prematurely middle-aged dull stick from recent Richard Curtis offerings. And presumably Keira Knightley was available and her spirited coltishness won\u2019t last for ever. She reminds me here of Winona Ryder\u2019s Jo in the \u201994 Little Women<\/i>, a film that captured a young actress\u2019s girlish spirit at its peak. Aside from her shoplifting trial, Miss Ryder has given few memorable performances since, and one hopes Miss Knightley is more fortunate.<\/p>\n

Her Darcy is Matthew MacFadyen, a callow fellow who strides gamely in all the key tracking shots and has a rumpled charm in much of the rest but who unlike Firth seems resistant to being a fantasy kissagram for the singleton audience. Not his fault. Darcy is in danger of ceasing to be a character by Jane Austen so much as a mythic liberation from English womanhood\u2019s contemporary frustrations. . . . MacFadyen and Knightley remind me a bit of Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman in Bewitched<\/i> \u2014 two solo turns that don\u2019t seem to require the presence of the other. MacFadyen has little pride and, with his co-star, less chemistry.<\/p>\n

As the film went on, I found myself thinking more about the hole than the doughnut. I\u2019ve been reluctant to grumble about Austen authenticity ever since I passed along my date\u2019s complaints about the anachronistic \u2018Good Gods!\u2019 in the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma<\/i>, and Alec Guinness wrote to the Speccie to draw my attention to page 40 of the book: \u2018\u201cGood God!\u201d cried Emma.\u2019 That\u2019ll teach me to plagiarise my nitpicks. Yet authenticity resides not merely in language and sets but also in a basic, well, sensibility. Jennifer Ehle never rode the TV P&P;<\/i> to the same big-screen success as Colin Firth, but she has one very great underrated quality, unobtrusively on display both in Austen and in that wonderful piece of Mary Wesley hokum, Camomile Porn<\/i> \u2014 er, Lawn<\/i>. She doesn\u2019t just climb into the clobber, she inhabits the period completely \u2014 whether as an upper-middle-class Englishwoman in second world war London or as an unwed daughter in a Hertfordshire country house two centuries ago.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Miss Knightley in both her most famous outings has been a contemporary wolf in period sheep\u2019s clothing. In King Arthur<\/i> and Pirates of the Caribbean<\/i>, she fulfilled the requirements of Hollywood consciousness-raising-by-numbers and turned the demure heroine roles into generic kick-ass proto-feminists. Agreeable as it may be to see the sylph-like Miss Knightley wallop pirate zombies and Saxon marauders, authenticity is the least of it. That\u2019s the problem here. Bring back Jennifer Ehle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FWIW, I bought a copy of the BBC version<\/a> for my wife shortly before we got married, but I haven\u2019t watched it myself. I guess I should, though, before the new film comes to Canada.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn, one of my favorite writers even when I disagree with him, has posted a few new film-related items to his website. One is a review of Clint Eastwood\u2018s Bridges of Madison County that he wrote for the Spectator ten years ago: Meryl asks Clint to stay for dinner, and he lopes around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSteyn on Bridges, Pride and Robert Wise<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mark Steyn, one of my favorite writers even when I disagree with him, has posted a few new film-related items to his website. 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