Jane Austen, With Attitude

With its self-effacing heroine and deeply moral concerns, “Mansfield Park” is Jane Austen’s unlikeliest candidate for screen success, but that hasn’t stopped writer-director Patricia Rozema from trying. She’s turned what is perhaps the novelist’s least appealing work into a vision of what Austen would have written if she were a fearless and committed 20th century feminist instead of an early 19th century spinster with the most subtle insights into human nature. If, in other words, she’d had the good fortune to be as self-consciously clever and politically correct as Rozema.

Though it takes some getting used to, Rozema’s subversive “Mansfield Park,” surely the first Austen adaptation to be rated PG-13 for “brief violent images, sexual content and drug use,” does have its points. It’s sensitively acted and Rozema’s belief in her audacious vision is so strong it brings a fine intensity to the material.

But though it’s never dull, this “Mansfield Park” has too much of its own agenda and too little of Austen’s to completely succeed. What’s implicit in the novel is made blatant and explicit here, what was merely hinted at with exquisite skill is now screamed from the rooftops. It’s an interesting take, and it always holds our interest, but it’s finally too ham-fisted to be a completely winning one.

Rozema has done all this by more or less ignoring heroine Fanny Price as written and turning that character into a version of Jane Austen herself, a controversial choice memorably skewered by columnist Ron Rosenbaum in a recent New York Observer piece. “They’ve taken a heroine whose identity was in the integrity of her resistance to being lovable,” he wrote about a film he variously calls “Mansfield (Theme) Park” and “Mansfield Park Nice,” “and made her into an audience-friendly, happenin’ babe.”

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From the film’s introduction of 10-year-old Fanny Price telling stories to her younger sister Susie, this is a character bent on creating imaginary worlds, a talent she is going to greatly need in her about-to-change circumstances. For impoverished Fanny is going to leave home to live with the wealthy Bertrams of Mansfield Park and be put under the care of the grave and grumpy Sir Thomas (Harold Pinter, of all people), his substance-abusing wife (Lindsay Doran) and Fanny’s other aunt Mrs. Norris (Sheila Gish). She is fated to be the classic poor relation, looked down on by all and sundry and treated like a servant by Maria and Julia, the snooty Bertram sisters.

Fanny, however, has two secret weapons: her male cousin Edmund, an all-around swell fellow, and her restless urge to write. Letters on top of letters flow back home to Susie, and soon the fictional Fanny is using up piles of paper scribbling clever histories and satires that were in fact written by the real Jane Austen.

As Fanny/Jane grows up into the attractive Frances O’Connor (memorable in the Australian comedy “Love and Other Catastrophes”), Maria (Victoria Hamilton) and Julia (Justine Waddell) still look down on her. And her best audience remains the always faithful Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller, unrecognizable from “Trainspotting”), who as the younger son (older brother Tom who stands to inherit the family fortune is a complete wastrel) is thinking of a career in the clergy.

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While the novel’s Fanny, “as fearful of notice and praise as other women are of neglect,” rarely had the nerve to say boo, this one is a regular firebrand, with a tongue “sharper than the guillotine” and way concerned with class differences, the position of women and the evils of slavery.

In fact, capitalizing on the fact that the Bertrams’ money comes from slave-run plantations in the West Indies, Rozema makes a bigger deal out of the horrors of that institution than comfortably fits into the picture, including commissioning a song called “Dijongna” (“Slavery”) by the great Malian singer Salif Keita and introducing an X-rated illustrated journal showing graphic scenes of rape and torture. Now there’s a touch Austen surely would have used if only she’d thought of it herself.

Into this confusing atmosphere, half modern and half traditional, come the Crawfords, Mary (Embeth Davidtz) and Henry (Alessandro Nivola), a brother and sister pair of sophisticated city mice who dazzle the countrified Bertrams.

Henry flirts with anything in skirts, and Edmund (oh, the fool) is very much taken with Mary, a woman much given to cigars and low-cut gowns who is never too busy to cast an unmistakably lascivious eye on our attractive Fanny.

An area where “Mansfield Park” the movie has more success than the novel is in one of the book’s pivotal situations, the suddenly serious infatuation flirtatious Henry develops for Fanny. Fanny resists (“No man died of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford”) but the quandary of how much and how sincerely a scamp can reform is given full treatment, as is the question, much closer to Rozema’s heart, of the almost unbearable pressures brought on women to marry for fiscal advantage.

Though Rozema’s radicalized vision is energetic and different, and she certainly can’t be accused of timidity, her film’s determination to be modern no matter what the consequences finally does it in. “Mansfield Park” is insistent to the very un-Austenish point of stridency about the horrors of insensitive men and the sad state of put-upon women; Rozema is so embarrassed at the tale’s inevitable conventional happy ending she can barely film it. And for every unexpected grace note there is a thudding line like “This is 1808, for heaven’s sake.” For heaven’s sake indeed.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for brief violent images, sexual content and drug use. Times guidelines: a glimpse of sexual activity plus a series of violent drawings in a book.

‘Mansfield Park’

Embeth Davidtz: Mary Crawford

Jonny Lee Miller: Edmund Bertram

Alessandro Nivola: Henry Crawford

Frances O’Connor: Fanny Price

Harold Pinter: Sir Thomas Bertram

Miramax Films and BBC Films present, in association with the Arts Council of England, a Miramax Hal Films production, released by Miramax Films. Director Patricia Rozema. Producer Sarah Curtis. Executive producers Trea Hoving/David Aukin, Colin Leventhal, David M. Thompson, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein. Screenplay Patricia Rozema, based on the novel by Jane Austen, her letters and early journals. Cinematographer Michael Culter. Editor Martin Walsh. Costumes Andrea Galer. Music Lesley Barber. Production design Christopher Hobbs. Art director Andrew Munro. Set decorator Patricia Edwards. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

In selected theaters.