Of course, there's a reason no one dares touch Pride & Prejudice, even as virtually every other Austen classic, from Sense and Sensibility to Mansfield Park, has enjoyed a fresh big-screen treatment in the past 10 years. The primary obstacle: the perfectly wonderful six-hour BBC miniseries, which fans have embraced as the definitive version, or more precisely, Colin Firth's portrayal of the dashing Mr. Darcy.

Even Keira Knightley, who plays Elizabeth Bennet in the new Hollywood version, which opens Friday in South Florida, confesses to being caught in the sway of Firth's performance. "The BBC TV version came out when I was about 10, and I got it on video and watched it on a loop for about two years. My brother absolutely hated me."

NOT INTIMIDATED

But director Joe Wright wasn't so easily intimidated by this best-loved of BBC's romantic leads.

"Colin Firth was too old when he played Darcy," Wright says, tossing off what might sound like fighting words so matter-of-factly, you'd think he was merely commenting on the weather. Wright's quick to dismiss the 1940 version, too, adding, "Laurence Olivier was [almost 40] when he played Darcy, and Greer Garson was in her 30s. Far too old, and that means I don't believe a word of it."

Approaching the material from an entirely new angle, Wright's new feature-length version feels fresh and alive in a way that earlier tellings haven't. He begins by restoring the characters to their proper ages, which lends a giddy excitement to the Bennet household (with its five young brides-to-be), allowing audiences to experience the true shock of key events, as when impulsive young Lydia (Jena Malone) runs off to elope.

"Austen was only 21 when she wrote the first draft of Pride & Prejudice," Wright says. "These emotions she was describing were only real when they were being experienced by young people -- when Elizabeth Bennet is 20, when Darcy is 28, when Lydia is 15. These are very, very young people experiencing these emotions for the first time. I felt I knew a secret about it. I had an idea of how to do a film about it that I hadn't seen before."

TEEN STARS

Wright's answer was to cast Knightley (then only 19) and a handful of teenage actresses as the Bennet sisters, tilting the story to privilege Elizabeth's point-of-view. At first, he was concerned that Knightley was too pretty to play Elizabeth, whom Darcy famously rejects as "tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me" at their first dance, and whose own mother considers "not half so handsome as [older sister] Jane" (played by Die Another Day's Rosamund Pike).

"I thought Elizabeth should attract Darcy through the liveliness of her mind, as it says in the novel," the director says. Despite his misgivings, Wright agreed to meet Knightley and was surprised to find "this scruffy kid with spiky elbows and holes in her jeans. She was basically a tomboy, and that struck me as the right quality, the right spirit for this thing."

FINDING MR. RIGHT

Wright faced a different challenge in finding the right Darcy. As much as audiences love Firth's portrayal, the BBC miniseries had done a more serious disservice than merely bending his age. From the opening shot of Firth riding into frame on horseback, the TV version establishes Darcy as Elizabeth's inevitable soulmate, whereas the pleasure of the book (and Wright's film) is the mismatch between Elizabeth's unflattering impressions and the perfectly suited partner he ultimately proves to be (which give rise to the book's title). For the right effect, both Elizabeth and the audience must slowly warm to Darcy, rather than fall for him from the start.

"I wanted an actor who would not be afraid of being disliked by the audience," Wright says, elaborating on how he chose to interpret the character. "Darcy's someone who hasn't hit the plateau of his 30s yet. He's lost his parents in a freak accident and was suddenly landed with this massive responsibility of looking after his sister. There are as many as 600 people relying for their livelihoods on his management of the estate. Overnight, he has to put on the suit of manhood, and it doesn't quite fit him. That's why he is the way he is. What Elizabeth does is teach him the true nature of being a man, which is to embrace the traditionally feminine qualities, like humility, thoughtfulness and appreciation of culture."

In a sense, each new adaptation of Pride & Prejudice says more about the politics of when it was retold than the time of its initial publication, although Austen would have no doubt approved of Wright's interpretation. "Austen's known as being the first feminist," Knightley says. 'She's unapologetic in making women strong, and that's an extraordinary thing for that era. I'm fascinated by the fact that she was a writer at that time, when women weren't. Her novels weren't allowed to be published under her name. All they said was 'by a lady.' "

Still, of all the Austen adaptations, Wright's Pride & Prejudice feels least like a conventional chick flick. As Matthew MacFadyen (the unfamiliar face eventually cast as Darcy) puts it, "What he has done brilliantly is take away the period glow, that chocolate-boxy, Merchant Ivory quality, and he's told it in a very unadorned and simple way. It's not a world where everything smells of barley."

If anything, it smells of stale wigs and unwashed clothes. "I was definitely not interested in trying to do a revisionist portrayal," Wright says. "It was really about trying to be as accurate as possible, but also trying to find cinematic equivalents of the prose that were faithful to the tone of the book." In one such scene, the camera drifts from room to room at a party, catching up with each of the characters in one uninterrupted take. "That was the equivalent of a paragraph," Wright explains. "Austen looks very, very closely at the mechanics of social interaction and human nature, so that suggested that I should use lots of close-ups. She's a young woman writing with immense energy and passion, so I wanted a movement to everything."

BREAK FROM FORMALITY

Wright's vision offers a refreshing break from the stodgy formality of other Austen adaptations. "One of the mistakes people make when they're adapting these books is that they want to have some sort of pictorial reference, so they look at the painting of the time, which depicts England as a kind of idyll where it never rains, and everything is seen through a perfect proscenium arch. It's very stiff, and I think that's a very obvious way to go."

Wright prefers a more disorderly, lived-in environment that gives audiences a sense of what life must have been like at the turn of the 18th century. Though this feature-length version obviously sacrifices much of the material found in the miniseries, the details he highlights actually bring the film closer to the spirit of the novel.

"Jane Austen's big criticism of the book [she wrote a letter to her sister just after she finished it] was that she should add more shade," Knightley says. "She felt the book was a little too light and sparkling, so I took her at her word," adds Wright. The result, as Knightley puts it, "takes it out of the realm of being just a bit of froth. It's set 200 years ago, but you can see it's the same emotions we're dealing with today. In a funny way, I felt like I was bringing it back to its true self."

[as featured in The Miami Herald]