MovieChat Forums > Mansfield Park (1999) Discussion > Was Mansfield Park supposed to look so r...

Was Mansfield Park supposed to look so rundown?

posted 18 years ago by Severus_Snape666
8 replies | jump to latest

I wtahced this today, oe of the reasons was to see what they did with the beautiful Kirby Hall, as it is one of my favourite English Heritage places and I love going there!
Obviously as the place itself is mostly ruined and only a small portion remains, they had to use camera angles which didn't show too much of the ruined portions of the building, but there were stil times when it was very bvious that large proportions of the hall were in very bad disrepair. Is this so in thebook or were the filmmakers just hoping we wouldn't notice?
Clare

[–] Unwanted_Birdtamer 18 years ago

No, Mansfield Park was not supposed to be rundown. It's described as "modern, airy and well-situated." Sir Thomas Bertram is also successful in his business endeavors (so had the money to upkeep the house repairs) and liked things well-ordered and well-run; he would not have let his ancestral home go to ruin and disrepair.

No one spoke,
The host, the guest,
The white chrysanthemums.

[–] randommovies2002 18 years ago

In Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations , Sue Parrill reports:

Patricia Rozema was particularly interested in setting [of the novel] as symbol and, instead of choosing the modern (eighteenth-century) great house which the novel called for, chose sixteenth-century Kirby Hall because its ruined state would suggest the fragile moral and economic foundation of the Bertram family. Michael Coulter, the cinematographer for both Manifield Park and Sense and Sensibility, shows Kirby Hall as dark, barren, comfortless. He frequently uses helicopter shots to open up the perspective and to suggest a freedom contrary to that which the characters experience (p. 14).

[–] Devans00 18 years ago

Thanks for sharing the quote, randommovies2002.

I thought maybe our modern definition of upkeep and maintenance differed from the days when everything had to be done manually. Including lugging water up to the highest points for cleaning.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

[–] HillE-5 18 years ago

Mrs. Norris also mentions that parts of the house will be repaired if Tom will stop gambling and wasting money.

[–] artistathome 13 years ago

I think the decision to show the place rundown was ridiculous. and contributes to the failure of the movie with audiences.

Back then if you had money your home was beautiful and you had plenty of servants to keep it that way. Even in Persuasion, when the family is in a bad way and leases out the home, they go to the beach and rent a home and it is small but gorgeous!

Mansfield Park and the Bertrams was supposed to show a lavish lifestyle and plenty of money from the plantations. This would have been handed down from generation to generation. Nothing in the home would have been sold.

So why in the world did they look as if they basically had the bare bones in furniture? I was so distracted by it. Even when Mary wants to marry into the family for money I am thinking "what money would that be?"

[–] Trippetta10 12 years ago

I know little about tastes in furnishings in early 19th century Britain, and I have no idea how historically accurate this film is in that respect. But maybe our ideas of how rich people lived in the past have been too influenced by Hollywood, and maybe even a well-to-do English family like the Bertrams in 1806 wouldn't have lived in a manor bursting with silk cushions and gilded furniture.

[–] loisbcuz-1 10 years ago

Very good point.

As I watched I kept thinking that the house looked like an institution or prison on the inside; it was a rather gloomy place one wouldn't really want to inhabit. I think this may have been to give the viewer the feeling of imprisonment that Fanny must have felt being treated as less and relegated to a room of squalor.

I agree with randommovies2002 quotation from Sue Parrill that "its ruined state would suggest the fragile moral and economic foundation of the Bertram family."

There was one scene where part of the building was an outer ruin with nothing behind the walls, which I found an interesting filming choice.

[–] mobocracy (902) a year ago

I think that the film industry generally feels it needs to show period settings as "old" to help sell the time and place to audiences, even when the places they show were relatively new by in the era where they're set. There's probably also the issue with trying to deal with real-world historic settings which aren't practical to make "new looking" for historical accuracy. The outside of Kirby Hall is just plain old and they don't have the budget to make the exterior look only 50 years old.

The Bertram family fortune seemed to have its origin in the plantations of Antigua, which probably means that they made their fortune and built Mansfield park within the last 50 years of the film's period era. So it not only wasn't that old, they would have had the money to keep it up.

The forces working against this, though, were just the realities of what level of "decay" people of the era were willing to accept as normal, even among the upper classes. It's not like a can of paint for touching up the walls was down at the home store, nor did they have modern cleaning products, either, so I think things were a bit dingier than we'd expect today.

It could also be that Mansfield was one of those country estates which had been bought as a partial ruin by the newly rich Bertram family, who then embarked on building a new wing to live in with the idea they'd refurbish what was still standing and integrate it later. Then there's also the idea that in an era of candles and lamps that some wing caught fire and just hadn't been rebuilt yet.