Coming in mid way through the Jane Austen revival that began in the mid 1990s with Persuasion, Mansfield Park is another joint production of the BBC (this time with Miramax). As with most of these joint UK/US productions, it has all the budget of a Hollywood film, combined with the authentic British locations, resulting in a lavish and immersive cinematic experience.
As with all Austen adaptations, you pretty much know what you're going to get - a plucky female challenges the status quo in 19th Century England. And, sure enough, Mansfield Park delivers exactly what you expect.
Where Mansfield Park departs from what you'd expect, is where it departs from the source material, most notably in a fairly obviously grafted-on condemnation of institutionalized slavery (something that was only passingly referred to in the book), but even so it's blatant humanitarian message does little to undermine, and perhaps even enhances the otherwise fairly lightweight girl-bucks-the-system romance.
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