From the opening moments of “Mansfield Park” (1999) – you know that this is not your typical Jane Austen adaptation. You meet the main character – Fanny Price – and it’s established that she’s creating a story to entertain her sister – yet she looks directly into the camera – locking eyes with you. Because of this – we develop an immediate sense of intimacy and connectivity with this narrator. Director Patricia Rozema went beyond the novel for this adaptation and used Austen’s actual letters and her journals as well – thus we get this meta effect. We’re aware of Austen’s actual creation of the story and her ethics, as well as Rozema’s – and her role as the movie’s auteur. In a way – the film feels like a predecessor to Greta Gerwig’s recent “Little Women.”
Also revolutionary – introduced from the start and bringing an unexpected relevancy to the movie – are the references to slavery. As young Fanny is brought to the Mansfield Park – she sees a ship on the bay and hears loud cries – and is told it is full of slaves. Sir Thomas Bertram – the owner of the estate – owns properties in Antigua and is involved in the slave trade. Director Rozema connects slavery and colonialism to Fanny’s need to break free from the role society has preordained to women.
I hope I’m not making this movie sound like an intellectual bore – because it’s the opposite. It feels quite modern and alive. You should know “Mansfield Park” is delectable – quite funny and romantic –and lots of fun. It’s also sexy – and there’s even homoeroticism! (Smelling salts, please!)
Fanny – like other Austen heroines – comes from a poor family and is sent away to live with her wealthy aunt. We find out Fanny’s mother married for love – she’s happy yet she’s poor. Her sister Lady Bertram married Sir Thomas for money – yet in order to comply with her fate she’s constantly high on laudanum. Rozema highlights this dichotomy by casting the same actress to play both sisters.
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram have four children and raise Fanny like the poor stepchild that she is – like Cinderella, she’s placed in the attic. Unlike her cousins, she’s smart and willful. Thomas, the oldest is a drunkard. His two sisters are non-descript and are only interested in getting married. The youngest sibling – Edmund – is the only one who values Fanny. Their lives are brought to an excited state of agitation with the arrival of the seductive brother and sister duo of Mary and Henry Crawford who will try to marry themselves into the family.
This duo are the ones that drive the narrative. The fact that marriage is a business transaction is made clear. Fanny is at the mercy of the times – resigned to whatever fate is decided for her. Yet in one of the most poignant moments in the film, Fanny has the resolve to say no.
The ensemble is terrific. Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola are scene-stealers in the roles of the tantalizing and callous Crawfords. The legendary playwright, Harold Pinter is commanding in the role of Sir Thomas. Frances O’Connor as Fanny is perfection. In a small yet unforgettable role is Hugh Bonneville, two decades before “Downton Abbey.”
I guarantee you will have a delightful time at “Mansfield Park.”
Sir Thomas Bertram: “What do you distrust?”
Fanny Price: “His nature, sir. Like many charming people, he conceals an almost absolute dependence on the appreciation of others.”
Sir Thomas Bertram: “And what is the terrible ill in that?”
Fanny Price: “His sole interest is in being loved, sir, not in loving.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Netflix and to rent on Amazon Prime, YouTube, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.
Screenplay by Patricia Rozema. Based on the novel by Jane Austen.
Directed by Patricia Rozema
Starring: Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola, Frances O’Connor, Harold Pinter, Lindsay Duncan, Sheila Gish, James Purefoy, Victoria Hamilton, Justine Waddell, Hugh Bonneville and Embeth Davidtz.
112 minutes
About Writer and Director Patricia Rozema
Born in Kingston, ON and raised in the small town of Sarnia, ON in a Dutch Calvinist immigrant family where television was severely restricted, Rozema didn’t go to a movie theatre until she was 16 years old. Rozema then studied philosophy at Calvin College and Seminary in Michigan (Paul Shrader’s alma mater). After a brief stint in journalism, her first feature, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, a magical realist film about a socially inept secretary in an art gallery made one of the most outstanding feature debuts in the history of Canadian cinema. At the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, in the Director’s Fortnight, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing won the Prix de la Jeunesse and was runner-up for the Camera D’Or (best first feature). The film opened the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to win numerous awards including being ranked in TIFF’s list of Top 10 Canadian Films of all time. Miramax released the film in the US to great acclaim. Rozema directed Six Gestures as part of the Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach series. It debuted at the Venice Film Festival. Rozema’s film was nominated for a Grammy and was awarded a Primetime Emmy, as well as a Golden Rose at the Rose d’Or Global Television Festival, the highest prize in television in Europe. In 1995, she wrote and directed a lesbian love story, When Night is Falling, which won festival audience prizes around the world and remains a classic in the gay community. Her next films were made outside of Canada. Rozema’s elegant progressive adaptation of Mansfield Park (1999, UK, Miramax).The film earned a Director’s Guild Best Director nomination and New York Times critic A.O. Scott hailed the film as featuring one of the Top 5 Female Performances of the year. In 2000, Rozema was invited to direct Happy Days (2000), part of an Irish production filming all of Beckett’s plays which included Anthony Minghella, Neil Jordan and David Mamet. In 2009, Rozema co-wrote Grey Gardens for HBO starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. She received an Emmy nomination, a Writer’s Guild nomination and a PEN USA award. Other television credits include the pilot and several episodes of the groundbreaking sexually explicit Tell Me You Love Me (2008) with Jane Alexander, Adam Scott, Luke Kirby, and an episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series In Treatment (2010). In 2016, Rozema completed adapting and directing the feature film Into the Forest with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood. She directed two episodes of Amazon’s Golden Globe-winning Mozart in the Jungle starring Gael García Bernal and Lola Kirke and an episode of CBC’s Anne with an E . Rozema’s latest feature,MOUTHPIECE (2018), was adapted from a play of the same name by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava…The film premiered as the Special Presentation Opening Night Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and was named one of TIFF’s Top Ten Canadian Films of the year. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (patriciarozema.com)
Frances O’Connor on Mansfield Park and Casting the Role of Fanny Price
“…it was O’Connor’s ”total honesty and lack of pretension” that grabbed the attention of Mansfield Park‘s screenwriter-director, Patricia Rozema (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing), who was ”casting about the entire globe,” for the ideal Fanny Price, the intellectual and impoverished girl taken in by rich relations. After seeing O’Connor in the ’97 Australian thriller Kiss or Kill, Rozema called her in to audition. ”She just screamed truthfulness,” the director says. ”You’ll never see her working the room. She’s a bit shy.” (EW) In an interview with CNN, Frances O’Connor discusses her role and take on the film. “I think it’s much funnier than I thought it was going to be. It’s actually quite biting and modern, more than I thought. It’s a lot warmer than I thought it would be. I know it comes at the end of a long line of Austen films, but I think it’s actually quite different in terms of what Patricia (Rozema, writer-director) has done with it. It’s not like an adaptation of “Mansfield Park.” It’s really a Patricia Rozema film. I think the dynamics are different, because it’s the journey of one woman against the establishment to finding love and finding her own sense of self.” (CNN)
The Making of Mansfield Park
“We went to all these stately homes that were stuffed and over-pretty and I said right from the beginning: ‘No floral patterns.’ I spoke about a flat gold, tarnished, very tarnished, look.” The country house in Mansfield Park is more decaying than decadent; there’s no hiding, for example, the squalor and unsanitary conditions of the impoverished Price household. While other adaptations focus on Regency life as a party, Rozema is more interested in the economic basis of the party. “My image was of the Titanic – I hope it wasn’t from advertising – but of playing music and dining elegantly while the whole ship was going down.” Sir Thomas Bertram is the patriarch at Mansfield Park and a colonial abuser in the West Indies where he owns a slave-driven sugar plantation. Between the two worlds stands Fanny Price. “[Austen] was creating a character who was the perfect slave. She was creating a personality for Fanny Price that was deferential and quiet, fearful of criticism,” Rozema explains. One of the reasons Mansfield Park is considered Austen’s least successful novel stems from the unlikely combination of Fanny’s absolute moral rigidity and her submissiveness. “I don’t make her some kind of superwoman. She’s still not a catalyst. She’s still very passive in the story,” says Rozema. “The basic rule of contemporary filmmaking and story writing is that you have to have your character active – and she’s not. All I did was to bring outside elements that aren’t far outside – they are from Jane Austen’s life and from her other writing – and added layers to Fanny Price, so that we in the audience at least get this privileged view of her inner life.” (Xtra Magazine)