One of my favorite rereads is also one of my favorite re-views.

I generally read Pride and Prejudice at least once a year - I enjoy it far above all the other Jane Austen books I've read. (I haven't read Northanger Abbey or Mansfield Park yet - I'm too afraid to read them and then have no more "new" Austen books to read.)

The Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth film version of Pride and Prejudice has also been one of my favorite things to watch - it wasn't uncommon for me to run it in the background back when I could see the TV from my table in the library. 

Now, I am NOT a Keira Knightly fan, by any stretch of the imagination. I enjoyed watching her in Domino and Bend it Like Beckham.  There's something about the way she stretches her mouth around her teeth when she talks and acts at us that annoys me to no end.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn that not only was someone DARING to remake Pride and Prejudice, but they were further cheapening it by replacing an actress who could say everything with the way she looked at the person across from her with Keira Knightly.  My only hope was that Matthew McFayden, who I liked in MI-5, was playing Darcy.

I held out for a long time - much in the same way I refused to watch Stargate SG1 when Farscape was cancelled, I refused to watch this most recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. 

I did watch it, and I was truly and honestly horrified. I didn't think there was any chemistry between the two leads and I was annoyed that they glammed up the ending.

For the past couple months Pride and Prejudice has been playing nearly constantly on Oxygen and so I've begun to watch it in the background since it is easier to watch on cable than replace Max and Ruby, The Incredibles, Cars, and Thomas in the DVD player.

The first thing that won me over was the glammed up, made up ending where Elizabeth and Darcy are sitting half-clothed on some sort of balcony outside and they are discussing how Mr. Darcy should refer to Elizabeth.  It took a few viewings, but eventually the reverent "Mrs. Darcy. Mrs. Darcy. Mrs. Darcy." got to me.

Many, many viewings later - to the point where even my own Mr. Darcy noticed what I was watching, I happened to be truly watching during the Ball when Darcy and Elizabeth dance.  The first time I must have been so disappointed that I missed what the director had done - eventually you realize that Elizabeth and Darcy are dancing in an empty room instead of a crowded ballroom. I think even the color of the walls of the room were different.  They must have filmed the dance twice and woven the shots together.  It's the sort of thing that is one of the reasons to make a movie out of a fabulous book - the director actually found a way to show us more.  The impropriety of Elizabeth's mother and sisters is also more blatant here - you see them lounging over couches and then doing their best to hide crumb covered dishes and their mending when an unexpected guest is revealed. A tipsy Mrs. Bennett spills her desert on an innocent bystander at the ball.  We see her parents through windows and framed in the bedposts. We see the mud and the farm animals behind the Bennett house and the movie plays more upon the idea that Elizabeth notices her change of heart when faced with Pemberly's grandure, although I think Keira Knightly makes this fact less subject to censure when she gives that tiny little laugh at fate in general when she first sees the sculpture room.

And now I'm hooked.

I can love two things at the same time, I guess. I'll always love what lies between Jennifer Ehle's and Colin Firth's Elizabeth and Darcy.  I've come to love the spaces around the characters in this latest version.