It is with deep regret that I have learned of the continuing plans to film “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” the 2009 bestseller with which Seth Grahame-Smith desecrated the text and the spirit of Jane Austen’s novel and the memory of the author herself. It’s one of the worst ways Austen’s most beloved book could have been “celebrated” on its 200th anniversary.
According to Variety, the British actress Lily Collins (“Mirror, Mirror”) is set to play Elizabeth Bennet in the movie, now called “Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies,” which has been dogged with problems during its development.
David O. Russell, who wrote the first draft, had been planning to direct Natalie Portman in the film but, Justin Kroll writes, “the script took too long to develop the proper tone,” leading to their departures “because of scheduling conflicts.” (Portman, who this week signed on to play Lady Macbeth in the upcoming British-Australian Shakespeare adaptation, is still attached to the “Zombies” project as a producer.)
Directors Mike White and Craig Gillespie followed Russell in and out of the door before Burr Steers (“17 Again,” “Charlie St. Cloud”) signed on recently. Blake Lively, Scarlett Johansson, Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway (no disgrace as the young Austen in 2007’s highly speculative “Becoming Jane”), and Mia Wasikowska reportedly turned down the chance to play Elizabeth.
Grahame-Smith’s book, which infests Regency-era England with zombies and ninjas and turns Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy into monster-slayers, is a mash-up as contemptuous of its source as the same author’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” was of the 16th president.
Assaulting Austen’s finely-tuned irony and precise analysis of manners, morality, and class distinctions with the crassest horror genre smacks of literary rape. I am not denying it can be extremely pleasurable to poke fun at sacred cows, as Monty Python did with their “Semaphore Version of ‘Wuthering Heights’” sketch and the British sitcom “Brass” (1983-84) did with D.H. Lawrence’s milieu, but there are limits.
The danger of impressionable adolescents (who already watch “The Walking Dead” in droves) coming to “Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies” before they come to “Pride and Prejudice” is cause for alarm. You could derail a burgeoning passion for literature that way.
It is a bad time to be an Austen purist. The August 16 release “Austenland,” which was adapted from Shannon Hale’s novel, sends an American fan (Keri Russell) of the BBC’s 1995 watershed adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” to an Austen theme park in search of a Darcy of her own.
Though it’s doubtless more affectionate than exploitative, the film conceptually treads similar ground to Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones” columns, novels, and rom-coms. Notwithstanding Colin Firth’s definitive performance opposite Jennifer Ehle’s Lizzie in the ’95 miniseries, Darcy-worship is so fin-de-siècle.
Firth, who himself parodied Darcy’s shirt-wetting in 2007’s “St. Trinian’s,” tired of talking about his household-name-making role years ago. “Good heavens,” he said with a sigh when, in a 2004 interview, I told him my mother had named her dog Darcy — in honor of his, not the one in the book.