SICK OF JANE AUSTEN YET?

WHERE WOULD LATE 20TH CENTURY pop culture be without Jane Austen,literature's first great chronicler of the young, the idle and the sardonic--not to mention the romantically addled? Without Austen's fine-boned fiction we might never have had an Ethan Hawke, a Whit Stillman or an NBC Thursday-night lineup.

As you, gentle reader, are no doubt aware, we are in the midst of an Austen revival, with movie versions of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion currently in theaters and an Emma on the way (and already in video stores in the tarty guise of Clueless). Next on the list is Pride and Prejudice, Austen's wittiest tribute to hanging out and hooking up. It airs as a six-hour adaptation for TV on the Arts & Entertainment cable network over three consecutive nights beginning this Sunday (8 p.m. EST).

Lavish and piquant as a mini-series should be, this co-production of  A&E and the BBC never misses a note of Austen's arch comic tone, following her narrative faithfully as the Bennet family sets about finding wealthy husbands for its five unattached daughters. Production values are first rate, with gardens and parlors so meticulously observed they could make Merchant and Ivory give up and turn to Die Hard sequels. And yet, amid the tastefulness, sexual tension lurks. Colin Firth plays Mr. Darcy, the romantic lead, as though he were a creation of the Brontes rather than the ironic, detached Austen. This Darcy is a man consumed by his passion for Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle), the novel's brilliant, voluble heroine. His eyes are piercing, and he cannot take them off her, in one scene ogling her from his bathroom window after languishing in a warm tub. Fortunately, despite one or two other such moments--not to mention an opening-credits sequence in which the camera pans over crinkled- up satin--this Pride and Prejudice never quite veers into Sidney Sheldon territory.

In fact, the filmmakers keep the focus on themes that must have made the book seem subversive when it was first published 183 years ago. For underlying Austen's comedy of manners is a sometimes grim drama about preserving a life-style in a world in which a woman's economic status was dependent on the brilliance of her marriage. The Bennet girls travel in polite society, but they are not as well off as the company they are trying to keep, a point they are not allowed to forget, thanks to the endless derision of people like the snobbish Miss Bingley, played with amusing bite by Anna Chancellor.

Of course, class limitations still play an active role in courtship games. At times, watching this Pride and Prejudice is not unlike reading the wedding pages of the Sunday New York Times, always a banquet of telling socioeconomic detail (alma maters, parents' occupations). You remember that most people travel in small orbits and that the chauffeur's daughter doesn't marry Harrison Ford. That's Austen: romantic comedy with a bracing slap of social truth.

--By Ginia Bellafante
 
 

Here we have a pleasant, serviceable version of Jane Austen's novel about the five Bennet girls and their stumblings toward the matrimonial altar. At six hours (over three nights), this BBC adaptation is a good deal more thorough than necessary. The minuets and pianoforte recitals seem to go on forever. And the casting could have been better: Jennifer Ehle, as Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, has an oval face, a secretive smile and shrewd, small eyes. She looks like Anais Nin in period clothes, and that ain't right. But Colin Firth is magnificent as her beau, haughty, mercurial Mr. Darcy. And there are flashes of Austen's heartbreakingly accurate wit, as in the misalliance of the girls' neurotic mother and cruelly lackadaisical pa, played by Alison Steadman and Benjamin Whitrow.  Grade: B 

01/15/1996 PEOPLE pg 13 

Pride and Prejudice 
A&E, Sunday-Tuesday 9 p.m. ET/10PT 
***1/2 (out of four) 

OK, so I'm prejudiced. I trudged to a puny downtown theater to see Jane Austen's Persuasion. I stood in the cold nearly an hour to get in to see her Sense and Sensibility. 

Picture the bliss of a snowy afternoon curled up at home with the six-hour indulgence of this elegant dramatization of her best-known work, Pride and Prejudice. (Not to be confused with the recent rebroadcast of Wishbone's delightful reduction, with the dog as Mr. Darcy.) 

This BBC/A&E co-production, airing in three two-hour blocks, may not be the best Austen on the suddenly crowded market. But it certainly is the most.

Though broadly played and leisurely in pace, where the country balls last so long you may weIl think they could have danced all night, this is the ticket for those who want more of a good thing, even at the risk of overdose. Unusually vivid in scenery and language, this enduring comedy of manners is a bottomless bonbon.

Especially tasty is the subtle performance of Jennifer E hIe, who has a Meryl Streep quality of elusive intelligence and porcelain beauty, as the spirited and ironic Elizabeth Bennet. As her aloof soulmate Darcy, Colin Firth is a slow-to-warrn lump of melancholy. His thawing is worth the wait. 

While we wait for Lizzie and her virtuous older sister Jane (Susannah Harker) to enter the ultimate happy state of lucrative matrimony, there is much to savor in Andrew Davies' (Middlemarch) faithful adaptation. 

As the long suffering father of the five Bennet sisters, Benjamin Whitrow makes a droll "connoisseur of human folly." He and sardonic Lizzy have plenty to mock: the ditsy Mrs. Bennet, overdone by Alison Steadman - she's like Cloris Leachman in a Mel Brooks parody; flighty kid sis Lydia (Absolutely Fabulous' Julia Sawalha); and any number of other colorful misanthropes and gossips who populate Austen's ageless world of social convention and unconventional wit.