Film Review: "Bride and Prejudice"

The refreshing “Bride and Prejudice,” a Bollywood re-working of the similarly-titled Jane Austen classic, delivers entertainment so good-natured it’s difficult to sneer at.

As the film opens, Balraj Bingley, his sister Kiran and culture-shocked American Will Darcy (Martin Henderson) travel to rural Amritsar, India to attend an extravagant celebration. Darcy -- heir to a staggering resort hotel fortune -- plans to investigate a nearby resort to see if it might make a good investment for his family’s empire.

But he is sidetracked after meeting the beautiful and headstrong Lalita Bakshi (Aishwarya Rai), the second eldest daughter in a family of four unmistakably marriage-available sisters. Darcy is ignorant to Indian culture and clashes with Lalita at first, but their early bickering only leads them down the path to eventual love.

Things are further complicated by the arrivals of Johnny Wickham (Daniel Gillies), a dashing Londoner who threatens their romance by claiming to know a darker, crueler side of Darcy, and a flagrantly un-hip suitor named Kohli who features some seriously goofy mojo.

“Bride and Prejudice” is directed by Gurinder Chadha, who also directed the hugely successful 2002 film “Bend it Like Beckham.” Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges, the writers of “Beckham,” also share co-writing credits here. Their script does a good job of incorporating elements of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” while weaving in enough cultural tweaks and modern updates to make the story their own. The characters in “Bride and Prejudice” are, for the most part, lively, fresh and generally believable. A few, like Darcy’s stuck-up mother, fall into the overly stereotypical column, but most avoid a similar fate.

The plot of the film is simple and transparent -- anyone who knows much about Austen’s book or has seen a few Hollywood-ized love stories will immediately know where this one is headed -- but the film is too energetic and has too much fun telling its story to for this to slow it down very much.

Those who are the least bit familiar with Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” will have no trouble deciphering many of the characters from the original text. While some elements of the book are easy to identify, the script employs more than enough originality to keep the film from coming off like a clumsy re-hash.

“Pride and Prejudice” excels at telling an absorbing story while simultaneously examining deep-seeded topics like class and women’s societal roles. In Austen’s book there is a clear distinction between the middle-class Bennets and the gilded upper-class world the Darcys and Bingleys inhabit -- even though society allows them to intermingle. Elizabeth Bennet -- the Lalita prototype -- challenges preconceived ideas about what womanly behavior entails when she (gasp) lets her skirt get muddy on the way to a visit with the Bingleys.

In “Bride and Prejudice” it is evident -- even more than 200 years later -- that we’re still plagued with many of the same issues. Big city Darcy is snobby and unreceptive to Indian culture and tradition until he becomes interested in Lalita and realizes he can’t win her over with merely the size of his wallet. Surrounded by Western luxury and armed with the appropriately stuffy-sounding British accent, Kiran Bingley is a cultural world apart from the Bakshi family -- despite their common ancestry. Lalita is encouraged to pick a husband not for love but for convenience and security, and her desire to marry for love does not easily jibe with Indian tradition.

Martin Henderson -- heir-apparent to Patrick Wilson’s Raoul in “Phantom of the Opera” in the line of barely-sympathetic male romantic leads -- does an adequate yet vanilla job as Will Darcy. Aishwarya Rai, the former model and Miss World titleholder who has since made an enormously successful transition into acting, is convincing in her first role English-only film as the strong-willed Lalita. But watch out for Nadira Babbar as the fretting Mrs. Bakshi and Nitin Chandra Ganatra as goofy Mr. Kholi, because they both have a stellar knack for stealing scenes.

The song and dance sequences are so incredibly colorful and vibrant that they give the screen enough wattage to light up a city block. The song lyrics and some dialogue border on cheesy at times, but this doesn’t cost the film too many points in the appeal department.

“Bride and Prejudice” isn’t looking to make too many profound statements or challenge filmmaking conventions. But that doesn’t make a film with this much energy and such a great sense of humor any less fun to watch.