Embeth Davidtz vs. Frances O'Connor
Battle of the Delicate Damsels

It's hard to make a period film in the post-civil-rights era. How does one find a balance between reflecting the customs and mores of the past without offending the sensibilities of contemporary audiences? Is it more important to reflect the reality of society's sometimes backwards practices -- warts and all -- or to portray characters that, if anachronistic, are more in line with today's priorities and values?

Let us take this question out of the abstract with some specific examples: Frances O'Connor and Embeth Davidtz. Davidtz launched her film career in Schindler's List, a movie in which historical accuracy was...well, kind of the point. Playing a Polish Jew ordered to work as the housekeeper for a concentration-camp commandant, Davidtz wasn't required to do much other than cower with fear, pretty much as a camp inmate working as a house servant would be wont to do. She followed up List with a movie that amounts to pretty much the ultimate in filmic historical inaccuracy: Army of Darkness, the third film in the Evil Dead series. Possible feminist tweaks to Davidtz's Sheila seem irrelevant in light of the fact that the film takes place in the thirteenth century, yet its hero fights zombies with a chainsaw.

O'Connor can't possibly compete with the anachronism that is Army of Darkness, but she also creates a character whose female emancipation and ambition we don't quite believe, in Mansfield Park. Based (loosely) on the novel by Jane Austen, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park posits a heroine, O'Connor's Fanny Price, who is not only a prolific writer of both history and fiction, but who is also a vocal opponent of her uncle's use of slaves on his plantation in Antigua. (Neither of those qualities, laudable though they both are, is ascribed to Fanny in the book.) Fanny is also censured by both the aunts with whom she lives for being too much of a tomboy, boisterously chasing her cousin Edmund around the courtyard and riding her horse with a little too much verve. All of this makes her a very vivacious and compelling character...just not a terribly believable one, given that the story takes place in the early nineteenth century. Yes, obviously, there were women writers then, and of course, there were female activists for the emancipation of slaves. But were they so at the age of eighteen? And would they protest the source of their uncles' wealth when the alternative to benefiting from said wealth is to be vaulted back to the households of their unemployed, alcoholic, possibly sexually abusive ex-sailor fathers? We say no. Besides which, as we've already said, none of that is even in the book. Why did Rozema feel it necessary to rewrite Austen along more progressive lines?

And why, while we're on the subject of Rozema's Mansfield Park hack job, would she rewrite the social climbing Mary Crawford (played by...oh, hello again, Embeth Davidtz) into what amounts to a Regency-era sexual predator? Perhaps we're overstating matters a little, but there are distinct lesbian undertones to many of her scenes with Fanny. Again, we're not saying there were no lesbians or bisexuals in early nineteenth-century England, but we suspect that they were not in the habit of coming on to their female friends while also campaigning aggressively to marry their female friends' male cousins. It just struck us as another case in which a contemporary filmmaker didn't find enough drama in the occasionally slow-moving and subtle treachery and triumph of an earlier era; in Mansfield Park, both O'Connor and Davidtz play characters in the Regency who, but for their hairstyles, wouldn fit in just fine on Melrose Place.

It might be a result of their playing contemporary women in historical settings that both Davidtz and O'Connor have subsequently turned up playing contemporary women in futuristic settings. We suppose that acting opposite upper-class British men in knickers is the ideal preparation for playing women who are perfectly at home expressing love for androids. At least O'Connor gets to hug an angelic prepubescent boy (in A.I.) instead of a hairy, middle-aged man covered in plastic prosthetics (as Davidtz had to do in Bicentennial Man), which, to us, makes this contest simple to resolve.

Advantage: O'Connor.