Pride and Prejudice and Bad Writing
If you thought you knew, you were wrong
#PridePrejuidiceAndMistletoe #UnleashingMrDarcy #PrideAndPrejudice #BookAdaptations #ThisOneWasJustBlah
What happens when you try to make a movie adaptation of a famous book but you don’t really understand the core material nor have you figured out exactly what the intention of the plot was? Naturally, you get a Hallmark movie. If we had a penny for every time this happened with Pride and Prejudice, we’d have 2 pennies. The fact that it happened twice is kinda funny, but in the way that if you don’t laugh, you’d cry because it’s so bad.
Actually, we’d have 3 pennies, because one of those movies has a sequel. Though it’s basically just a one and a half hour advertisement for the miscommunication trope. Oh, and we should mention that one of those adaptations was, for some reason, a Christmas movie.
Listen, nobody has high hopes for Hallmark to begin with and yet, here we are. We’d normally summarize the media we’re about to examine but we are doing two movies and neither did a great job pulling from the source material, and we haven’t figured out how to include the graphs and spreadsheets we needed to figure out their…stylistic choices. But, long story short:
“I have not the pleasure of understanding you.”
Unleashing Mr Darcy (Hallmark Channel, 2016) is the spark notes version of Pride and Prejudice written by a screenwriter that has a new-found love of dog shows and has been struggling to get their rom-com show-dog movie sold. This is the movie that generated enough revenue Hallmark wrote a sequel; Marrying Mr Darcy (Hallmark Channel, 2018). Except, it has as much in common with Pride and Prejudice as we do with Fox News; it has only slightly more to do with its own prequel movie. They recycled the characters, that was it.
Meanwhile, Pride, Prejudice and Mistletoe (Hallmark Channel, 2018) attempted to fit a ‘generic Hallmark movie plot’ onto character and place names from Pride and Prejudice. That was the only thing they ‘adapted’. We can’t figure out why either. It was pretty much just a big city girl going home to meet ‘the stuck in their hometown’ boy living the ‘dream life’ and she realizes she doesn’t like her high-paid, successful career and she does want to live closer to family and get married.
After pulling ourselves out of our confusion-induced stupor, we decided that if anyone else was going to brave these movies, they would need a guide to aid them through the maze of hallmark trash. So we’ve put together a handy-dandy character reference guide so that anyone daring enough has a flotation device to cling to. The following is a list of some of the characters you might expect to see (sorry, Kitty, you didn’t make the cut – or is it a congratulations in this case?) although none of them will be as straightforward as they might seem (a little similar to Cinderella and the Four Knight).
"You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves."
Elizabeth
In UMD, Elizabeth Bennet, the second daughter of Mr and Mrs Bennet, is played by Elizabeth Scott, a history teacher and show dog handler person, (yes, the latter, it’s a real job apparently), from Washington D.C. who has an unexplained obsession with Queen Victoria and her dog Dash. Lacking in money and prospects after losing her job (because a rich kid was failing her class but needed to play lacrosse), her mom’s rich BFF comes to the rescue and sweeps her off to the exotic land of New York City. We give this Elizabeth a 3/10 – only one sister, she’s tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt us.
In the other corner of PPM, Elisabeth has been personified by none other than, you guessed it, the male lead. Luke Bennett has no money, no prospects, and at 27(??) years old, he may not be a burden to his dead parents, but he certainly is the bane of Darcy’s existence. The owner of a small-town diner, Luke likes cooking, Christmas, and arguing with his old high school debate team members. He is prejudiced against the rich, although he does own a restaurant he can evidently neglect for a couple of days to help organize a Christmas charity fundraiser instead. As an adaptation of Elizabeth, we give this a 1/10 – a significantly less number of sisters, doesn’t demonstrate a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing or dancing, and can only speak English, as far as we know.
Mr Darcy
UMD serves us Fitzwilliam Darcy, 10,000 a year, in the form of Donovan Darcy, a subtly rich guy with a very powerful family charity, who is super busy at work, but also judges dog shows every week. He hates calling handler numbers more than once and DOES have a younger sister. His entourage consists of his best friend, his best friend’s sister, and his aunt that supposedly came to help with his sister, Zara, but is never shown on screen with her. 4/10 – a proud, unpleasant sort of man, but they hit the highlights in terms of important characteristics. Too much dog show stuff (though none at all in the sequel).
Fitzwilliam Darcy in PPM, however, has been cast as Darcy Fitzwilliam, a big city investment firm partner that’s missing something in her life. She has a hometown-shaped hole in her heart, and it’s Christmas time. With too much time on her hands, she returns home to help her mother plan a last-minute charity event in three days. -1.5/10 – too happy and chirpy, not enough walking around ballrooms without dancing, her coming into the country at all is a most insolent thing, indeed.
Jane Bennet
Jane Bennet, ie. Jenna Scott in UMD, is very supportive of her sister’s decision, but seemingly leaves her job in D.C. at their mother’s bridal gown store to spend time in New York City, where she instantly falls in love with Donovan’s best friend, Henry Robson, and only shows up again to explain that she’s going on dates or that Henry is moving to D.C because, presumably, she’s blown through all her savings and needs to get back to work. 4.5/10 – not the worst character, a serious lack of walking in the rain leading to colds, but really a very sweet girl. We wish her to be well settled, and there is a chance of it.
Jane Bennet exists for a total of circa 12 seconds in PPM, mostly hanging around in the background of ensemble scenes. 0/10 – we didn't even know Luke’s brother had a name until we looked it up online. It’s Jim, he wasn’t going down the dance. Didn’t spend the winter in London.
Mr Bingley
Mr Bingley in UMD, or rather Henry Robson, is Donnovan’s best friend since childhood. He’s a lawyer, we think, and his most important contribution to the film is that his character has a sister and he has a car big enough to trick Elizabeth into joining them for a charity tennis match hosted at the Darcy estate. 5/10 – was likely that he fell in love with one of them and therefore Jenna must be happily settled at Netherfield.
Mr Bingley in PPM is Daryc’s BFF Caylee and has as much screen time in the movie as Jim. She’s only there to gush about how she’s now engaged and to also throw a white elephant Christmas party where people have to wear dumb stuff they win. She also helps with sending around a video advert for the charity event. 0.5/10 – we are not in a way to know what Caylee likes as we are not to see her that often and didn’t see her dance with Jim twice at a ball or otherwise.
Miss Georgiana Darcy
Mr Darcy’s sister, not-Georgiana but Zara Darcy has a fairly central role in UMD, however she becomes a major character in the sequel. She instantaneously becomes besties with Elizabeth and plays matchmaker for her brother. Needs help with writing, which also apparently is part of teaching history. 8/10 – Elizabeth knew something of the art; and from such she had willingly turned to look at some history homework of Miss Darcy’s, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and also more intelligible.
This is the first real wildcard PPM throws at us, Georgiana Darcy is in fact, the late-hire tree decorator for the charity auction at the Christmas party (if you read that sentence twice and it still doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it). The connection is a bit tenuous, but Darcy is enthusiastic about the addition to the planning committee and anticipates the introduction to Luke. Maybe squint a bit when you watch it and that will make it work more. 9/10 – would hire to decorate our Christmas tree, was taken from her little shop, and an establishment formed for her in London, didn't vent her feelings in criticisms.
Caroline Bingley
Caroline Bingley, known as Felicity Robson in UMD, may be Donovan’s childhood friend, but he’s clearly not interested. She does a good job of inviting herself along to every event he attends and for her lack of employment and commitment to Donovan’s entourage, we had to give her a 9/10 – never once tried to insult Elizabeth’s fine eyes. True to the original, one of the villains in the story.
Caroline Bingley is best embodied by Carl in PPM, Darcy’s ex-boyfriend and the manager of her father’s business branch in ‘the big city’. He’s hanging around having meetings with her dad for the whole movie, instead of lying to Luke about his relationship with Darcy and trying to separate Jim and Caylee. This actually could be going on behind the scenes. We choose to believe there are complex plots by Carl to ruin Luke and Caylee’s dates. 2/10 – jumped a little from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment and couldn’t read the room.
Lady Catherine
In UMD, Violet Darcy dislikes Elizabeth a good amount, but gets a redemption arc in MMD. We’re unsure how we feel about giving Lady Catherine de Bourgh a chance to make amends but without the sequel, this was a fairly convincing adaptation. 12/10 – her manners were dictatorial and insolent. Was never confirmed if she was the patron of an off-screen Mr. Collins or not but made for a great on-screen antagonist nevertheless.
PPM delivers another wild spin on the character for Lady Catherine. In this adaptation, they have split the role into several partners at Darcy’s firm attempting to force her to resign. As far as evil aunts go, they don’t manage to find the core of the character and instead spend too much time talking about dividends and minimum buy-ins. 1/10 – did not possess a great amount of frankness and never asked Luke a single question.
Mr Wickham
For the final villain of the story, George Wickham, we had to do our first mental gymnastics in UMD to cast Mr Wickham but alas we found him personified in principal Whatshisname (Dr. Thurston) who fired Elizabeth because the rich people on the school board said to. After a later round of bribery by Donovan Darcy, he tried to give Elisabeth her job back. 1/10 – not a pleasant fellow, would jilt you creditably.
Both movies got a bit creative, but none-so more than PPM. Wickham is the unnamed waiters that abandon Luke on the day of the party. Perhaps they discovered that Darcy was involved in the event, or their gambling debts caught up with them and they decided to resign their commissions and head off North. 3/10 – their studying of how to wait tables was a mere pretense.
“Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.”
In a major upset, it turns out the winner of each movie is Extreme Underdog Mary Bennet! We supposed the dogs in UMD fill this role to some degree, but only if you consider balls at Netherfield and dog shows roughly the same thing. 15/10 – because dogs.
For PPM, that’s the singing and waitering orphans. 10/10 – The whole event was supposed to be raising money for the orphanage, but we guess we can’t expect them to get actual charity and they need to work for it and “they’re just excited to show their gratitude”.
Don’t watch these. If you have to watch them, just remember Hallmark is using the word ‘adaptation’ as loosely as possibly. Pride and Prejudice has more in common with this article than either movie.
Image Credits
Chabert, Lacey [@thereallacey] (2018). “🎄🎄Just one more week! 🎄🎄#PridePrejudiceandMistletoe airs on @hallmarkchannel Friday November 23! I hope you enjoy it!” 16 November, https://www.instagram.com/p/BqQEh-6FNGC/?igsh=MXhxdzFxazVxaHA2YQ%3D%3D
Wilson, Teri [@teriwilsonauthor] (2024). “🍿🎬 NOW SHOWING 🍿🎬 Hallmark is re-airing both of my Mr. Darcy movies over the next couple weeks! Mark your calendars, doggy and Darcy lovers! 🐾” 22 January, https://www.instagram.com/p/C2aom2AgndI/?igsh=MTZ4aXJ4NXRka2lwcQ%3D%3D&img_index=1