The writing in this fanciful "biography" isn't up to the novelist's standards, but the performances sparkle and the look is lush.
This is All Things Considered from NPR News, I'm Michelle Norris. Jane Austen's romantic novel, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice are among the most celebrated works in English literature. Relatively, little is known about Austen's own romances. She never married. But letters to her sister contained hints of her flirtation. Well, a new movie is based on those hints. And Bob Mondello says that for readers of Austen, the film Becoming Jane will feel very familiar.
The English countryside's marital pickings may be slim in 1795, but when 20-year-old Jane Austen catches the eye of a gentleman of wealth and position, she does just what a Jane Austen heroine would do: She turns him down because she finds him dull, much to the distress of her mother.
There is no money for you.
Surely something could be done.
What we can put by must go to your brothers. You will have nothing unless you marry.
Well, then I will have nothing. For I will not marry without affection like my mother.
And now I have to dig my own damn potatoes.
I could live by my....
Your what?
I could live by my...
Pen? Let's knock that notion on the head once and for all.
This, I believe, is called ironic foreshadowing. In any event, the reason Jane is hesitating about her rich, dull suitor is that she also has a dashing, penniless suitor, a Mr. Lefroy, with whom she enjoys arguing.
Allow me to think for myself.
Give me the opportunity to do the same, sir. I've come to a different conclusion. Will you give so much to a woman?
It must depend upon the woman, and what she thinks of me.
Two potential husbands, disapproving parents, a yawning class divide. What's a would-be author to do? Well, write about them presumably. But in a movie she must also do something a little more active like argue about rile writing.
If you wish to practise the art of fiction, to be the equal of a masculine author, experience is vital.
And, er, what qualifies you to offer this advice?
I know more of the world.
hehehe..A great deal more, I gather?
Enough to know that your horizons must be widened.
Shouldn't that be broadened? Well, never mind. Austen didn't write the screenplay after all, though her characters and plot twists are all over it. A suitor from one, an elopement from another, a country dance from a third. I won't pretend I know which ones attach to which books. All of Austen sort of blends together in my head. Sense and Prejudice, Pride and Sensibility, and which one has that guy Darcy again? Which makes this film's mix-and-match approach just fine with me. You can quibble about the occasional modernism creeping into dialogue that is definitely not in a class with Austen's. And biographical purists will doubtless complain that a flirtation with the real Mr. Lefroy who later became Lord High Justice of Ireland is referred to exactly twice in all of Jane's hundreds of letters. The filmmakers have, shall we say, embroidered here.
But there's still plenty of pleasure to be had from the film's Merchant Ivory-style lushness, and from performances that almost ache to be called sparkling. Anne Hathaway's spunky Jane, James MacAvoy's briefly gallant Lefroy, Maggie Smith's imperious Lady Gresham, everyone well aware that they're making not art in Becoming Jane, but a frothy romp, the cinematic equivalent of a good-read for the beach. I'm Bob Mondello.
And you can find more of Bob's reviews as well as features and interviews at NPR.org/movies.
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