by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was something called Pride
and Prejudice Atlanta (the imdb.com site
spells the title Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, but the colon doesn’t appear on the actual opening
credit), which began a series they’re doing over the next two months called Book
to Screen, with the hype “Best-sellers make
the best movies.” I had seen the promos for Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, which given that all the participants were Black
indicated that this was a transposition of Jane Austen’s classic story of early
19th Century Britain into contemporary African-American Atlanta —
though I wasn’t sure whether the screenwriter, Tracy McMillan (any relation to
the much better-known African-American romance writer Terry McMillan? Her imdb.com page doesn’t say) worked
directly from Austen or there was an intervening novel that did the
transposition of Austen’s white British characters into modern-day
African-Americans. Be that as it may, Pride and Prejudice Atlanta deals with basically the same situation as Austen’s
original: a middle-aged couple, Rev. Bennet (Reginald BelJohnson) and his wife,
Mrs. Bennet (Jackée Harry) — we’re never given first names for either of them
at any time in the film — have five daughters of marriageable age.
Their
oldest, Lizzie Bennet (Tiffany Hines), is a community activist who can’t stand
rich people in general and one rich person in particular, Mr. Bingley (Brad
James), a Black real-estate developer who wants to tear down a town square and
an old movie theatre and build a shopping mall and high-end housing in their
place. He’s got the support of the powerful Darcy family, including Will Darcy
(Juan Antonio) in particular. Will is a drop-dead gorgeous and fabulously
wealthy young Black man who after a stint in business in New York has moved
back to Atlanta and is running for Congress in a Black-dominated district. He’s
also got two brothers, one natural and one adopted, who are as physically hot
as he is — the adopted one is George Wickham (Phillip Mullings, Jr.), who was
the son of the Darcys’ maid and whom they took in and raised following his
mom’s death (and who gets to have hair while the natural-born Darcy males shave
their heads). The moment the camera first panned down the lineup of the five
Darcy daughters it occurred to me, and not for the first time in a Lifetime
movie with African-American principals, that the casting directors (on this
film they were Fern Champion and Simon Chasin Lieblein) were so determined to
disprove, once and for all, the racist stereotype that “all Black people look
alike” that they cast dramatically different-looking people even though we expect five sisters to look at least somewhat alike. It turns out the real power in the Darcy family is Will’s aunt Caroline
(Victoria Rowell), an imperious woman who lives in what looks like a former
plantation house (though writer McMillan didn’t do this, I would have wanted
her to have a line to the effect that once upon a time Black people were the
property of people who owned mansions like that, and now they — or at least
some of them — can own mansions
like that) and who has masterminded the rise of her family to a leading
position within the African-American 1 percent. (The fact that there is an African-American 1 percent will probably surprise
a lot of people watching this film; I got the impression that, just as the
Lifetime movie With This Ring
seemed to be a “message” film telling middle-class Black women that they don’t
have to date white men because middle-class Black men exist, this one seemed to
be aimed at telling middle-class Black women that upper-class Black men exist.)
One of the Bennet sisters is taken
horseback-riding by one of the Darcy men, falls off and breaks her ankle — a
symbol of the cluelessness with which the decently off Bennets approach the
world of the super-rich Darcys (the wittiest line in the film is one in which
Aunt Caroline, who wants the next generation of Darcys to marry Black
debutantes, asks Lizzie, “Did you come out?,” and Lizzie responds, “No, I’m
straight”) — and the course of true love between Lizzie Bennet and Will Darcy
runs through a bunch of bumpy stretches, mainly due to the political deal he made
with Lizzie’s sworn enemy, the developer Bingley, to get money for his campaign
in exchange for using his influence to get Bingley’s project approved. At two
points during the movie Lizzie overhears Bingley and Will colluding on the
project, but in the end, though she loses the struggle to save the town square,
Lizzie keeps the Strand Theatre alive when Will double-crosses Bingley by
buying it himself. In the end, Will Darcy marries Lizzie Bennet and his brother
marries one of Lizzie’s sisters in a double wedding ceremony which, thankfully,
Papa Bennet brings in another Black minister to perform instead of insisting on
doing it himself. There’s also a subplot in that Lizzie’s mother wrote a
best-selling book on how to find good husbands for your daughters but hasn’t
been able to manage that herself — even though the opening line of her book is
simply a more colloquial version of the opening line in Austen’s novel: “It is
a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
I’ve never been that big a fan of Jane
Austen — the only novel of hers I’ve read is Emma, and that only because I took a junior-college
English class in which it was taught — but watching Pride and
Prejudice Atlanta has made me want to read
the source novel even though my quarrel with Austen has always been that she
invariably has the dullest, most boring man in her story marry the dullest,
most boring woman and she tells us she regards that as the triumph of morality
and good sense over romantic idiocy. Austen lived just as the Romantic era was
getting underway, but she made no secret of the fact that she hated it; her
stories generally feature one young man who spouts all the Romantic clichés
just as they were becoming clichés and makes an ass of himself while pursuing
the woman Austen destined for the sober, reliable, sensible but also rather
dull guy in her story. (In Pride and Prejudice Atlanta this character is a young boor who’s just come back
to Atlanta, is wearing mousse in his hair and is determined to take over the
ministry of Rev. Bennet’s church as soon as Rev. Bennet retires … or dies.) Pride
and Prejudice Atlanta was slow going at
times, but for the most part it was an engaging romantic comedy which occasionally featured white people (mostly as silent guests and,
presumably, campaign donors at the reception Aunt Caroline throws for Will
Darcy’s Congressional bid) but mostly was set in a world so hermetically sealed
off from multi-racial reality it reminded me of the 1930’s and 1940’s “race
movies.” If this film has a hero(ine), it’s the director, Rhonda Baraka, who
made a film in 2008 called Pastor Brown that was apparently a recasting of the prodigal-son story into modern
African-American terms (though imdb.com lists Baraka as only writer, not
director, of that film). Given the movie industry’s prejudice against women
directors in general and Black
women directors in particular, it’s not surprising her career has got stuck in
the TV ghetto even though she deserves considerably better than that. Her
direction of Pride and Prejudice Atlanta is fast-paced, moving and steers clear of the traps in the material
(particularly the difficulty of transforming an 1813 novel about the British
upper classes into a story about contemporary Black America), and she also gets
excellent performances from her actors, particularly the women (especially star
Tiffany Hines, whom I also hope to see a lot more of) who get to play fiery,
salty and independent!
