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Verdict: A bit clueless.

Details: Frances O'Connor and Alessandro Nivola. Directed by Patricia Rozema. Rated PG-13 for brief violence, sexual content and drug use. 1 hour, 38 minutes.

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Review: In recent years, Jane Austen's work has accommodated everyone from Ang Lee to Alicia Silverstone. But somehow, Austen and Patricia Rozema, who gave us the winningly daffy "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing," don't hit it off so well.

Rozema has "modernized" Austen's third novel, "Mansfield Park." She's given it a dash of lesbianism, a pinch of feminism and a dollop of social conscience (the slave trade figures as the tainted source of the family's money). Further, she has extrapolated portions of Austen's own journals into the scribblings of the heroine, who now wants to be a writer (she has no such literary ambitions in the book).

Thus, this "Mansfield Park" becomes a kind of romanticized gloss — an imaginative grad-student thesis that melds author and character. It sounds intriguing enough on paper, but on screen, it loses much of Austen's sparkle, wit and point. And hearing an Austen heroine worry about slavery is a bit jarring — like hearing one of the Pokémon characters ruminate about the effect of the atomic bomb on the emotional life of postwar Japan.

The story, in many ways, sounds more like something out of Dickens. Ten-year-old Fanny Price is lifted from appalling poverty by fate and genes. She's sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park. Her position is a little uncertain — not quite family, yet not quite a servant. But then, everything at Mansfield Park is a little uncertain &3151; from the imperious patriarch, Sir Thomas (playwright Harold Pinter), to his laudanum-addicted wife (a very funny Lindsay Duncan, who also doubles as Fanny's poor mother back in Portsmouth).

Fanny grows up to be Frances O'Connor, a cute-as-a-button paragon of smarts, integrity, writing skills, you name it. Her best friend and soul mate is Edmond (Jonny Lee Miller), Sir Thomas' second son (the first is mostly busy slaving in Antigua). Clearly, they're made for each other, but then there'd be no plot. So onto the scene burst the thoroughly modern Crawfords, Henry (Alessandro Nivola) and Mary (Embeth Davidtz), a charmingly unscrupulous brother-sister act, who manage to turn things topsy-turvy at staid Mansfield Park.

O'Connor, an Australian actress who is already attracting comparisons to Nicole Kidman, seems gloriously happy as a paragon; she suggests Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music," without the songs or the kids to upstage her. Everyone in the movie keeps telling her how terrific she is (usually addressing her by her full name). Even Lady Bertram manages to stumble out of her happy haze to declare, "The next time the pug has a litter, you shall have a puppy!"

Rozema's at-arm's-length contemporary agenda may work as an intellectual exercise, but it robs the movie of any sense of anything being at stake. Or, for that matter, of who some of these people are. A last-act reconciliation between Sir Bertram and his eldest son would be touching, I guess, if the son hadn't spent most of his time off screen in Antigua. It's as if Rozema, deep down, didn't trust the material. Maybe "The Bridget Jones Diaries" is more her style.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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