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"Patricia Rozema's daring adaptation of 'Mansfield Park' is a witty look at romance and reality, Jane Austen-style," proclaims the first line of the Miramax press notes. But as the perfect viewer for this film -- someone who, beforehand, had read other Austen novels but not this one -- I found it as daring as a "... for Dummies" book. And "Jane Austen style"? Is that like the "kosher style" of a deli willing to carve a ham next to a corned beef?

The way Rozema has shaped, cast and told it, "Mansfield Park" is a toothless underdog fable that urges us to cheer on a spunky poverty-stricken gal named Fanny Price as she proves herself the better of rich relatives. The worst is her officious aunt, Mrs. Norris (Sheila Gish), but the rest of the family is also a bunch of glittering non-prizes, from brusque patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter) and his laudanum-quaffing wife (Fanny's other aunt) to their lightweight daughters and wastrel elder son. Only the younger son, Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller), is close to Fanny's equal and deserving of her affection. Even he allows himself to be suckered for an unconscionably long time by the opportunistic Mary Crawford (Embeth Davidtz), whose flirtatious brother Henry (Alessandro Nivola) sets his cap for Fanny and won't take no for an answer.

In the movie, Fanny's superiority to all she surveys is so obvious that it cheapens rather than heightens Rozema's chosen themes, including the arrogance of the British upper class, the pressures a patriarchal system puts on women and the importance of the slave trade to the landed gentry's wealth. When Fanny's careworn mother in her insect-ridden hovel persuades her daughter to entertain Crawford's proposal by saying, "I married for love," audiences erupt in laughter, reacting to the ludicrous incongruity between the sturdiness of the film's Fanny and her mother's no-exit view of her circumstances.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

This Fanny is hearty and independent and a literary comedian of Jane Austen's caliber. Indeed, she spends much of the time declaiming, directly to the camera, the high points of Austen's youthful writings. (Hence the credit: "Based on Jane Austen's novel, 'Mansfield Park,' her letters and early journals.") The actress who plays her, Frances O'Connor, is obscenely wholesome -- a Sally Field look-alike with a touch of Mary Tyler Moore. She could turn the world on with her smile, and when she finally wins her man, her beaming face proclaims, "He likes me! He really likes me!" Rozema frames her with such gee-whiz romanticism that each of Fanny's love pangs registers like a gong.

Is it a sure sign of a weak conception that everyone in a film reminds you of someone else? Nivola, as that cad Crawford, bears a striking similarity to Jay Mohr, who plays the amoral movie producer on Fox TV's "Action." Sophia Myles, who plays Fanny's grown sister Susan, resembles Leonardo Di Caprio. The only inspired presence here belongs to Lindsay Duncan, who plays the drugged, pug-adoring Lady Bertram with a fragile ennui that in context is downright effervescent.

The slow-mo riding and dancing scenes evoke perfume commercials, but on the whole this movie has the pumped-up air of Broadway musical dramedy. After Fanny goes to her first ball you expect to hear her sing "I Could Have Danced All Night." (A friend counter-proposed that the model for this movie's Fanny is Maria from "The Sound of Music," who also made herself indispensable to aristocrats by exploiting her cuteness and sanity.)

Unfortunately, between all the gliding camera movements and flamboyant set-ups, what we get are flabby tableaux, not show-stopping numbers. By transforming early 19th century characters into reckless hedonists -- Mary Crawford comes on to Fanny, and Henry and one of the Bertram sisters get caught in the sexual act -- Rozema dissipates the tension instead of notching it up. The erotics of this film are a joke: I wasn't the only one laughing when Fanny turns Henry down and is next seen chopping up a carrot. (Sometimes a carrot is only a carrot, but not here.)

A more jarring burlesque ensues when Rozema attempts to graft 20th century outrage onto the Bertrams' ownership of slaves. Fanny leafs through the elder son's pictorial record of West Indian horrors and realizes that his wildness is actually a reaction to his father's colonialist cruelty and hypocrisy. The effect is not to bring home the horror of moral complacency but to reduce slavery to a psychological skeleton key -- and plot device.

Since seeing the movie, I have: 1) given the Penguin edition a swift read, under the influence of Tony Tanner's lucid introduction; 2) listened to a 170-minute BBC Radio dramatization, from 1997; 3) watched the four-hour BBC TV production, from 1983; and 4) skipped around in Natalie Tyler's sprightly compendium, "The Friendly Jane Austen" (Viking, 1999). Rozema's movie now seems not just silly, but a gigantic wasted opportunity. The book's Fanny is quiet, gentle, even frail (mere walking tires her out). Yet her refusal of the dashing Mr. Crawford is as deep and resonant as Melville's Bartleby saying, "I prefer not to."

As Tanner writes, "In her stillness she is not inactive: on the contrary, she is often holding on strenuously to standards and values which others all around her are thoughtlessly abandoning. Typically, she welcomes the 'tranquillity' made possible by Mansfield Park at its best." Turning Fanny into a robust woman of letters, Rozema throws out what makes the book a masterpiece. Rozema's Fanny, who plays snap-the-shawl and cracks wise about Joan of Arc, becomes one more colorful personality -- like the Bertrams or the Crawfords, only more virtuous and sensible -- while Mansfield Park ends up standing for nothing more than luxury.

As actress Anna Massey told Natalie Tyler, the BBC TV production "was not always the deepest of renditions." But Massey was splendid in it as Mrs. Norris, and Sylvestra Le Touzel proved that a skilled performer could bring out the dramatic firmness of a retiring Fanny. And the boisterous BBC Radio version found ways of milking the comedy without obliterating Fanny's organic identity. By contrast, this "Mansfield Park" is a travesty. You can't say that Rozema performs an act of literary excavation with her quotations from early Austen: I found nearly all of them (including the original and ungrammatical "Run mad as often as your chuse; but do not faint") in the "Dancing Days and Juvenilia" section of "The Friendly Jane Austen." Even Austen's own treatment of the slavery issue has more reality and sting to it. In the book, Fanny tells Edmund she "longed" to press her uncle about the slave trade -- but when she brought it up to him "there was such a dead silence!"

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