Sir Thomas's wife, Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan), is a bleary-eyed, nodding-out junkie in the thrall of the opiate laudanum. Other modern touches include blatant drug addiction and hints of lesbianism. Her categorical rejection of Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola), a wealthy aristocratic dreamboat whom Sir Thomas insists she marry, marks her as a proto-feminist heroine who risks losing everything by standing up to male authority. The movie's Fanny is an ambitious, willful writer from a poor background whose unstoppable intellectual drive is synonymous with her integrity. The novel's rather meek central character, Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor), has been retooled and pumped up for the film into a spunky Jane Austen stand-in who recites directly to the camera fragments from Austen's letters and diaries. Where the novel alludes to the slave trading business of Sir Thomas Bertram (Harold Pinter), the pompous authoritarian who owns the estate called Mansfield Park, the movie rubs our faces in his dirty business. ''Mansfield Park'' takes special pains to remind us that the glory of the British empire and the comfortable life of the novel's landed gentry were the products of colonial exploitation. And it speaks to the heart of a film that is determined to invest Austen with as many prickly contemporary resonances as it can shoehorn in without appearing wildly anachronistic. This reminder of how every age foolishly fancies itself the most progressive and enlightened in the history of the world is drenched in irony.

''My God, this is 1806, for heaven's sake!'' a character exclaims in ''Mansfield Park,'' Patricia Rozema's smart, politically pointed screen adaptation of Jane Austen's third novel.

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