![]() ![]() (Sarah Greenwood is the production designer.) Characters make their way around props, past painted backdrops and through catwalks, ropes and backstage rigging. Petersburg are rendered as elaborate stage sets. Wright’s brilliant gamble is to arrive at this level of emotional authenticity by way of self-conscious artifice. McEwan will find no reason for complaint. The proof of their mediocrity is that admirers of Austen or Mr. Instead of strong, risky interpretations, they offer crib notes and the pale flattery of imitation. For all their technical polish and the admirable discipline of their casts, those films remain trapped in literariness. ![]() ![]() His screen versions of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” are not terrible, just cautious and responsible. The British director Joe Wright has seemed to me - up to now - to belong to the dreary party of humility. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker’s will. The bad ones - or let’s just say the average ones, to spare the feelings of hard-working wig makers and dialect coaches - are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. ![]()
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