Mighty Like a Rose

Patricia Rozema revamps Mansfield Park with an eye toward de-wimpifying its heroine.

Dressed in a loose-fitting black sweater, her hair piled messily atop her head and a sly smile on her face, Patricia Rozema is like the worldly aunt who slips you a glass of wine when your parents aren’t looking. She’s instantly voluble and eager to talk about Mansfield Park, her new adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Departing from the mannered ranks of recent Austen adaptations, Rozema’s is an erotically charged retelling, filmed with cinematic flourishes and an unabashedly 20th-century point of view.

Mansfield Park is the last of Austen’s novels to be adapted for the big screen, and as Rozema tells it, that’s because, even among Austen aficionados, the novel’s heroine is regarded as "a bit of a prig."

"It’s a difficult novel to adapt," Rozema explains, "because the main character is kind of a wimp and no one likes her. She’s famously unliked."

Rather than abandon her desire to film the novel, which she calls "a fascinating, rich and complex piece," Rozema (pronounced with a long "o" and an accent on the first syllable) chose to perform an unusual act of scriptwriting surgery on its protagonist, Fanny Price. In essence, the character Frances O’Connor plays in the filmed Mansfield Park is an amalgam of Fanny Price and Austen herself. Like Austen, the young Fanny writes fanciful, florid tales and like her creator, Fanny struggles for independence in a world that has yet to allow women any such thing.

"I chose to change [Fanny’s] character," Rozema recalls, "and rather than just changing her willy-nilly to make her more like me or someone I happen to like, I brought Austen’s characteristics into Fanny Price."

In doing so, Rozema drew on numerous Austen biographies and critical articles, and took freely from her letters and journals (which receive source credit along with the novel itself). Rozema even confesses to stealing several lines from Northanger Abbey.

Funnily enough, Rozema found supplanting Fanny Price with Jane Austen "didn’t radically change the rest of the story," which involves a number of shifting love plots played out against the backdrop of the titular English mansion. Fanny, raised in an impoverished but loving household, is transplanted at a young age to the house of wealthy relatives, where even as a servant she learns to dress and speak in a manner far above her family’s station. Her quasi-noble status causes much confusion when she and Edmund Bertram (Jonny Lee Miller), the youngest scion of Mansfield’s patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram (embodied by a magisterial Harold Pinter) begin to develop a romantic attraction for each other, one which not only crosses class lines but directly opposes the elder Bertram’s plans for assuring his family’s financial fortune. As is Austen’s way, the plot becomes a good deal more complicated from there, especially with the arrival of the rakish Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola) and his cunning sister Mary (Embeth Davidtz).

"My main attraction to this novel was that it points to the fact that this gentility, this sweet, leisurely world rests on a crime, is built on evil."

The resultant turmoil throws the origins of the Bertram family fortune into stark relief, especially when Sir Thomas returns from a slaving trip to the West Indies to find his eldest son Tom (James Purefoy) near death from an illness brought on by months of constant debauchery. While attending to the sick Tom, Fanny accidentally happens upon a book of his sketches which chronicles in horrific detail the abuses Sir Thomas and his men have wrought upon their slaves.

Rozema says it was this aspect of Mansfield Park that most induced her to make the film. While the sketchbook scene is not in the novel, Rozema says Austen clearly intended the novel to point to "who’s paying for the party," to expose the rotten roots of English nobility. "My major, major impulse," she recounts, "my major attraction to this novel was that it points to the fact that this gentility, this sweet, leisurely world rests on a crime, is built on evil. England’s not alone in that — I’m from a Dutch background, and the Dutch were great slavers. Every wealthy nation has a people that they pissed on. I find this important knowledge or awareness to bring to these period pieces, which are often celebrations of how gentlemanly the gentlemen used to be and how ladylike the ladies were. They’re these celebrations of good manners — people never swore in those days, and doesn’t that make a great movie? But I really needed — I could not live, I could not have made this movie if I didn’t include that aspect. I would have thought it immoral."

Rozema’s focus on Austen’s political themes and her reshaping of Fanny Price have already drawn predictable fire from Austen purists; though Rozema spoke several weeks before the film’s American opening, she was already anticipating such attacks, while constantly reminding herself there was as yet no reason to be defensive.

"My job is to respect the moral agenda of the author," she explains. "Of course [the novel] changes. You’re changing forms, you’re changing architecture into poetry. It’s just a discussion I have to have with myself: Could I hold my head up if I was sitting opposite Jane Austen? I think I could. I think I managed to uncover a few things."

Rozema, who was raised in a Dutch Calvinist community in Ontario, never saw a movie other than Snow White before the age of 16, a fact which no doubt accounts for the importance of writing in her films (which also include When Night is Falling and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing). She admits the idea of placing an author into her own creation is an unusual one for film, but cites the works of Pirandello, Diderot, Milan Kundera and Paul Auster as literary antecedents.

With Mansfield Park, Rozema pays memorable tribute to the erotic power of writing. A scene of Fanny preparing quill and paper for writing is filmed with glowing tenderness, and the opening credits run over a series of extreme close-ups which turn parchment the color of skin and focus on what Rozema calls the "fetishized details" of pen and ink.

"The idea was," she explains, "that this may appear like something small, the scribblings of a teenage girl from a family of no consequence in 1811. But it’s huge. When the ink drops, you hear something like an explosion."

See Sam Adams’ review of Mansfield Park.