Mansfield Park

Watched the DVD of Mansfield Park (1999) last night - I wanted to see how it compared with the recent Jane Austen season on ITV. Well, it wasn't too bad, but it demonstrated yet again the problems actors and directors have with Austen. It's a bit of a cliche that historical films and television tell you more about the period in which it was made then the era they're trying to depict, but Austen's works, probably because her books are essentially about manners and morals, are particularly susceptible. So we had a feisty, modern Fanny, and a sensitive 'new man' in Edmund, plus numerous references to Sir Thomas Bertram's wealth having been derived from his plantations in the Caribbean, and his involvement in the slave trade, complete with Fanny's discovery of a sketchbook of pornographic drawings of slaves. I understand what the film-makers were trying to do but it just seemed tacked on (which it was), and didn't relate to the narrative. They were probably attempting to make a point about the basis of the Bertrams' wealth, but it was all subsumed into the standard Austen happy ending. And as with nearly all recent Austen adaptations, we had to endure a thick layer of loud, treacly background music all the way through - it didn't let up for a moment.
There were some nice performances, mainly from reliable stalwarts like Lindsay Duncan, playing both Fanny's downtrodden mother back in Portsmouth, and the opium-addicted Lady Bertram. Hugh Bonneville, Jonny Lee Miller and Harold Pinter were also excellent - these actors can always be relied on to bring a script to life. I also liked the little girl who played the young Fanny very much.
In the end, though, it was all a bit tiresome - too much slushy music, too many attractive views of large country houses and too many scenes of horse-drawn carriages driving along country roads. Please, please, can we have a moratorium on Austen? Her books used to be rarely adapted, until the enormous and deserved success of Pride and Prejudice on BBC in 1995. Now we're overloaded with them. At least can we have one without background music!