It's apparent to me that director/writer Patricia Rozema never decided what genre to use for this film as she's all over the place. The end result is a mass of confusion which attempts to focus on Jane Austen's book "Mansfield Park", biographical sketches of Jane Austen herself, as well as an historical look back at black slavery issues simultaneously and doing none justice. As if all this wasn't bad enough, Rozema couldn't even decide what time period she wanted to use for the movie. It's not just major flaws in the script which has the various characters expressing themselves in ways which would have been much more appropriate for a character of today but also the costumes are all wrong. Many of the characters just seem to exist. As a viewer, I find little character development to make me care one way or the other about most of the cast of characters in this film. Even the leading female and male characters in the film seem lost among the others due to a lack of contrast. Worst of all is the most unimaginative use of narration that I can recall seeing in any film to date. Although this was meant to serve as a transition between scenes and to move the plot along, it fails miserably. There also seems to be a large amount of indistinguishable dialogue in this film that was not intentional. It wasn't until I watched this film with the director's comments which had the actor's dialogue in captions that I even understood what was being said in some scenes despite the fact that I had tried repeated playbacks. They must have have some audio problems. Music for this film was too loud in places and poorly chosen. Speaking of director's comments: Her primary motivation for making this film (according to what she said on the film's DVD version) was a scene which which utilized sexually explicit and violently graphic pen and ink drawings of slaves. Huh? For a Jane Austen film? Yes! Hear the comments yourself in the DVD version.<br /><br />