I saw a preview performance last night of the Pride and Prejudice movie. A whole bunch of disclaimers are in order: I worked on this a little; got a couple days in worth of script doctoring, uncredited. I know Andrew Black, the director, and Jason Faller, the producer/screenwriter. They're former students of mine, and guys I still think of as close friends. I have, therefore, a certain level of Pride in their achievement, and far too much Prejudice to even pretend to be objective.

All that out of the way, it's pretty good. I love Jane Austen, have read all the novels, seen all the movies, including the TV miniseries lengthy treatment of this story. The most obvious thing to say about this film is that it's sort of like Clueless, only with Mormon characters. If you are the sort of Austen fan, like me, who liked Clueless, you'll like this too, and if you're the sort of Austen fan who hated Clueless, don't bother to see this one.

Seen strictly as a Mormon themed comedy, though, it's pretty good. It's got some life and pace and energy. It looks great. It looks like a film made by people who love movies. You see a VW driving through traffic, and it's accelerated, a la Guy Ritchie. The music is terrific; it sounds like the sort of music that people who love pop music listen to. It's minus the two devils that have plagued Mormon themed comedies heretofore; it doesn't have that horrid sanctimoniousness of some earlier efforts, and the acting is all pretty solid; which again hasn't always been the case.

I just finished talking to one of my colleagues, who was also there last night, about it. He thought it was very slow paced, especially early on. It took me some time to figure out what he was talking about. But he's right in this sense; the story progresses quite slowly initially. We don't learn much about the various characters or their relationships very quickly. And so, in terms of engaging us in character and story, it's slow paced. But that's not so important to me. To me, the early scenes in the movie established a visual style that the film generally sustained, and that style, that approach WAS fast paced. Hip, fresh, cool. And a breath of fresh air, frankly, given the visual dreariness of some of the Mormon films we've seen up to now.

Basically, the story echoes Austen, except that Elizabeth, Jane, Mary, Lydia and Kitty are friends and roommates. Lydia and Kitty are sisters, and their parents own the apartment; Jane and Elizabeth are friends, and live there. Mary is socially inept, very well acted by Rainy Kerwin. Jane is imagined as an Argentinian beauty, with a strong Spanish accent. Elizabeth is a 26 year old college student, majoring in English (creative writing) at a place that closely resembles, but is not specifically named as, BYU. I assume she's meant to be a grad student; based on how she dresses, she's pretty obviously not an RM. Darcy is British, and LDS, imagined as a well-to-do publisher. Charles Bingley is a wealthy friend of Lydia's, conceived as sort of a goofy but pleasant eccentric. Jack Wickam is the villain of the piece. Mr. and Mrs. Bennett are entirely absent.

The Austen-to-BYU conversions are sometimes interesting, and sometimes rather strange. The class divisions of British society certainly have their Utah society counterparts, but the film doesn't seem to be making any particular statement about class; Darcy's wealth is more a plot convenience than any sort of satirical jibe aimed at East Bench Mormons. Elizabeth is supposed to be of modest means financially, but that's not really explored much, and certainly wealth or class aren't impediments to her relationship with Darcy. I really don't get why Jane is supposed to be from South America, but I thought Lucila Sola, as Jane, was reasonably interesting, if a trifle bland, in the role.

Like any romantic comedy, it works if we like the main couple and root for them to be together. At that level, Pride and Prejudice is very strong. Kam Heskin as Elizabeth and Orlando Seale as Darcy have great on-screen chemistry. Heskin is terrific, frankly. She's charming and funny and likeable. I loved a number of her acting choices. She goes running with Jane, and she clearly hates every minute of it; Sola runs with fluidity and grace, and Heskin runs like she's about to collapse and die at any minute. I buy that, and I like Heskin's willingness to look bad. Seale is equally convincing as both the superior snob and the sensitive and kind would-be lover.

One subtheme throughout the film is something called The Pink Bible; a sort of Fascinating Womanhood-type book, which, in the world of the film, is supposed to be a huge Utah hit. Lydia and Kitty have The Pink Bible memorized, while Elizabeth, who has to keep restocking it at the book store where she works, hates it. It's a fun little motif.

I wish the writing were as strong as the performances. I was one of several writers who worked on it, and must bear my share of the blame for this, but the biggest difference between this film and Clueless is that Amy Heckerling is a funnier, wittier writer than any of us are. A subplot involving Collins (Hubbel Palmer) pursuit of Elizabeth was well acted, but the writing, especially of his proposal scene, was very flat, and the pace subsequently flagged.

And the film has one Death Wish Scene. (I've written about Death Wish Scenes before; Death Wish Scenes aren't just badly written scenes, their scenes so idiotically conceived that you wonder what in the world they were thinking.) Jane and Elizabeth have had setbacks. Elizabeth has misread Darcy, and Jane has been abandoned by Bingley. And so they binge out on ice cream and completely trash the apartment. For a week. They spend a week wallowing in misery, ice cream and pizza. (Oh, and apparently, there's a link between ice cream orgies and PMS. Who knew?) And then Lydia, brandishing The Pink Bible, saves them.

This is an insane scene, and I'm not just saying that because I tried to persuade Andrew to cut it and he didn't listen to me. I mean, that's okay; he's a talented young director, and why should he listen to me? But it's an awful scene, and what makes it worse is that, for the audience last night, it was clearly pretty funny. But we've come to regard Elizabeth as a sensible, confident, talented and bright young woman. And she has one little romantic setback--which for her character isn't even much of a setback, frankly; she's misjudged a guy she doesn't even like much, so what?--and drops out of life completely for a week? The very definition of a Death Wish Scene is a scene where a character does something utterly out of character, that makes us hate them, at a moment where, for narrative purposes, we need to like them. The Pink Bible stuff is very funny, but only because it involves satirizing ideas we all loathe, like basically all those found in Fascinating Womanhood. To have Elizabeth go off the deep end over nothing, and then have The Pink Bible save her? What were they thinking?

It's also easily fixable. Just adjust the time frame. One day, sure, I buy that; you could decide to drop out and binge out for one day. A week; no way, and it's not funny, and I say that knowing that an audience last night though it was very funny. But it hurts the picture.

The ending of the film is contrived, and the worst acting in the film takes place close to the end, in a Vegas wedding chapel sequence that just falls flat. All in all, the winding up of the various stories seems perfunctory, and strains credibility enough to undo a lot of what was accomplished earlier.

But all in all, the film still works reasonably well. It's far and away the best comedy among the Mormon films that have been released up to now. It's a far better film than Single's Ward. It doesn't make fun of Mormon culture like the Halestorm films do; it's just a nice retelling of a familiar love story, with characters who happen to be Mormon. At its best, Pride and Prejudice is a charming, pleasant romantic comedy, made with some real style and visual wit. I think it will be financially successful, and I'm rooting for it to be successful; it's a likeable film. I think it's a major step forward for the LDS film industry, and I'm excited to see Andrew Black's next film. He's a very gifted young director.

Eric Samuelsen