Pride and Prejudice ( 2005 )

This review was supposed to be my big April Fools’ Day joke— I had a whole bit. You know, me finally making my mom to watch one of my favorite movies for once. But it’s May now… and the only joke left is how long it took me to get this written. 

Better late than never, right? (Much like Mr. Darcy’s love confession. More on that later.)

Unlike all of the horror, action, and other garbage my mom has inflicted upon me in my short lifetime, I wanted to do the same.

Make her sit though a proper, well mannered period piece (and my personal favorite) Pride and Prejudice.

She didn’t not take it well.

Now I love Pride and Prejudice. I love slow-burn yearning, I love regency-era beef, I love Donald Sutherland, and I love having to google “entailed inheritance” to keep up with the plot. This is less of a review and more of a long-con just for an excuse to talk about something I like for once. 

This is my site too and I’m putting my foot down.

But let’s walk through this entire movie— in case you’ve somehow managed to avoid every adaptation of this book or the floods on Tumblr gifsets that still take up the entire “pride and prejudice” google search. 

I didn’t even get to start the movie yet and she was asking to watch “Pride and Prejudice with zombies” or “What about this Abe Lincoln and vampires movie”. Boooo. Boring.

We open in the English countryside to the hectic Bennet family. The estate is beautiful, the piano is out of tune, and in period piece realness the financial anxiety is ever present. You see, the Bennet’s don’t have any sons and that’s a massive issue back then. Mr. Bennet is getting up there and his wife Loretta is terrified of him passing and the family house being lost. This begins her one-woman crusade to marry off all five of her daughters as if they’re about to spoil (which… I guess back in their day 20 was like ancient.) 

Here comes Mr. Bingley— he’s rich, nice enough, and incredibly available. He takes ones look at Jane, the eldest Bennent daughter, and falls in love. The two flirt with the competence of two socially anxious golden retrievers.

But Mr. Bingley does not come to this ball alone. No, he brings someone even more important … Mr. Darcy. 

Mr.Darcy is equally rich, tall, broody— everything you could ask for in a romance plot. His whole demeanor screams “I’d rather die than be here”. And honestly, my mom should have loved him— they’re very similar in that regard.

He shows up to this dance, immediately insults Elizabeth, the second eldest Bennet sister, and basically leaves.

Now by this point of the movie it’s started to settle on how the main characters will be Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, but don’t worry as we will go through at least 3 other romances to keep the fluff going. They’re trying to drive in just how much of a slow burn this was for the Regency-era.

And here’s where the complaining began. You see… the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in my family either. Where I begrudgingly watch (then later complain about) movies my mom makes me watch. No, no— my mom is worse. She will actively whine and complain the entire time. 

Which she did. Every four seconds. 

While I sat enchanted by flirting that makes no sense unless you have google translate handy. She was complaining that everything that was going to happen was too obvious. 

But I don’t care. This is my favorite slow burn in all of cinema history. 

Enemies-to-lovers started here. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy spend the next two hours of this movie making intense eye contact, arguing across rooms, and misunderstanding everything around them. Perfect.

And in the middle of all this drama, we meet Mr. Collins, the Bennet’s cousin and heir to the estate once Mr. Bennet passes. He proposes to Elizabeth (this is the regency-era… it’s weird but it’s what happened) in the most painful and second hand embarrassment inducing scene I have watched in a long time.

She turned him down.

So what does he do? Turn around and propose to her friend Charlotte who lives by the saying “beggars can’t be choosers”. 

Apparently dying in misery is better than being poor in every era of life. Oof. It never gets better, huh?

And while you think Mr. Darcy can’t get any worse, he confesses his love to Elizabeth in a line that will forever be repeated at weddings and cringey love declaring between nerds for years to come.

Did it read as “I love you despite your terrible family and complete lack of wealth”? Yeah a little. A bold strategy even. One that doesn’t work as Elizabeth shuts him down in a spectacular fashion. Leaving him left in the rain.

Here comes Mr. Wickham, a charming solider with a tragic backstory and a perfect set up to start a schemer campaign on Darcy to make Elizabeth hate him even more. 

So while Mr. Darcy is around stomping through moors and haunting local fields, Mr. Wickham is lying about his entire character!

Honestly, this plot point dies within seconds as Elizabeth gets a letter finding out how Mr. Darcy has been secretly doing good deeds in the shadows like a less aggressive victorian Batman.

At this point we finally hit the turning point where anger becomes romance, Elizabeth starts to come around to seeing Mr. Darcy less like a prude and more of the awkward, sweet, and painfully rich man that he is.

And of course— it isn’t any movie without one more punch. Elizabeth’s youngest sister (there’s five of them, remember) decides to go and elope with Mr. Wickham. Which is basically a 18th century TMZ scandal. 

And to sum up an incredibly long scene: Mr. Darcy just faces it. He spends his money and his pride to clean up everyone’s mess like the brooding romantic janitor he is.

Unlike the other janitors we’ve dealt with in past movies.

Elizabeth finds this all out and her heart melts. 

If all that was what he needed to do he should have flexed his wallet (and his hand— we all know that iconic hand flex) and this movie could have been way shorter!

By the time Elizabeth finally…finally confesses her loves it’s met in a sunrise proposal and the audience (read:me) is ecstatic— maybe even misty eyed. 

It’s satisfying in a way that modern romance is rarely shown: it’s earned, slow, full of small gestures and unspoken looks that are more than trivial dialogue can convey.

Now… here’s what I think.

I’ve loved Pride and Prejudice since the first time I watched it. Did I need someone to translate everything going on during it? Yes, I absolutely did. 

Not that it’s hard to understand— but everyone is arguing with a thesaurus and a grudge and insults that flew over my head. 

But this time I had the great pleasure of being regency-era subtitles for my dad (a secret side character during this watching). So it all comes full circle one way or another.

And with every watch I find myself loving this movie a little bit more. The yearning! The passive-aggressive circling in living rooms! The collar on Mr. Darcy’s coat that has more of a room presence than his awful personality! It’s everything I could want.

But this movie is more than Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy— is the sound track (that I actively listen to while writing this), the costumes, the pacing It all is so perfect to me. 

Every single cast member was perfectly picked: Judy Dench in a glowering candlelit room, Tom Hollander’s mildly uncomfortable chapel man, Donald Sutherland who is perfect in everything he does even if he had only a handful of lines, Matthew Macfadyen’s never changing expression (unless it’s those sad, sad puppy eyes).

Perfect. This cast is stacked like a pile of Penguin Classics.

But someone didn’t agree. During the entire movie my mom sat and huffed and puffed, staring at her phone asking when it would be over. I even started quizzing her like this was a Jane Austen final.

She passed. Barely, but she watched it and that’s what counts.

Did she say that Keria Knightly had the acting range of a teaspoon? She did. But that teaspoon contains my entire universe

Was this an April Fools’ Prank over a month off schedule? Absolutely. Did my mom suffer through every frame like it was a personal attack? Without question. 

But I got to watch my favorite movie and that, dear readers, is a win to me.

5 stars from me. My mom gives it 0, but she also thinks Sharknado is art, so who’s really the authority here?

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