Well,
I thought nothing could match the Olivier P&P for appallingness but
I was wrong. This production was terrible in just about every way. Oh
to be sure, the camera work, the sunsets and the scenery were
exquisite, but that does not in itself make the film good. Keira
Knightly is absolutely awful, sneering her way through scenes with a
twist of the lip that one supposes was intended to represent Lizzie's
inner humour while Mathew Macfayden makes a very tawdry Darcy. Mr
Bingley looked more like a nutty wizard, escaped from Harry Potter and
thank god the stilted acting of Miss Bingley was kept to a minimum.
Donald Sutherland (much as I like the actor in other roles) was
completely wrong for the part of Mr Bennett as was Brenda Blethyn as
his wife. The plot was even more hurried than the 1940 production, glossing over many of the motifs so quickly that it would be hard to keep up unless you knew the novel. The scenes were messed around with for no readily aparent reason except that the producers seemed desperate to distance themselves from the 1995 production. The plot order was also interfered with for no discernable gain except that it turned the whole into an incomprehensible mess.
The Bennet's home life lacked the lucidly illustrated gentility of Austen and made the family look more like some market gardener with his finances exhausted through having too many daughters. Having a large pig walking through the family home was about as un-Austen as you could get and the incoherently muttering Sutherland following the overly testicalled beast, made me think that he had perhaps auditioned for the part of Lord Emsworth and stumbled onto the wrong set by accident.
According to the IMDB, Emma Thompson, who scripted the superlative 'Sense and Sensibility' had contributed much of the dialogue for this production 'Uncredited'. Perhaps she should have kept it that way, the dialogue is not at all good.