Jane Austen has the honor and misfortune of being one of the best-loved and most adapted novelists in cinematic history, so the tropes that one associates with films based on her books are well-enough worn that they feel like prime material for subversion: the long skirts dragging in the mud; the waiting for crucial letters; the dropped gloves and the erotic charge of fingers brushing against fingers; the terse, weaponized exchanges that reveal themselves to be either delicate, coded come-ons or sly declarations of domestic warfare. Faithful Austen movies tend to fall into two categories, the best digging deep into the emotional and social aspects of the novels to draw out a universal poignancy and sweetness, and the rest being nearly indistinguishable from each other.
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