Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Radish King by Rebecca Loudon
Next story: Enchanted: Stardust

Not So Plain-Jane: Becoming Jane

Click to watch
Trailer for "Becoming Jane"

In each of the six novels Jane Austen finished during her abbreviated life—she died in 1817 at age 41 of illness—the young heroine achieves a happy resolution to her romantic problems. Her novels’ endings scarcely resemble Austen’s own romantic experience. Though she received and declined at least two marriage proposals, one a day after accepting, she died a spinster.

Becoming Jane, Julian Jarrold’s new film, tries to bridge this discrepancy between art and life with an almost wholly invented love story. If it’s mostly historical humbug, it has been brought off with at least a modicum of taste and wit. It doesn’t exhibit the spirit of literary and historical larking that lent John Madden’s 1998 Shakespeare in Love much of its appeal. Jarrold and his movie seem to take themselves more seriously than that Bardic romantic comedy and travesty. Indeed, as this movie progresses, a proto-feminist message becomes increasingly apparent.

In Becoming Jane this mingles with a mostly bogus affair of the heart. Its historical fiction is almost as ill-founded as the earlier film’s, but it is a lot more sobersided, and it comes with implicit moral instruction.

The movie’s takeoff point is the actual visit in 1795 from a young Irish man, Tom LeFroy (James McAvoy), to a Hampshire neighbor of Austen (Anne Hathaway) and her family. It’s known that the budding novelist met LeFroy, liked him and danced an unseemly three dances with him at a party. She may have never met him again.

Becoming Jane’s LeFroy is a youthful, budding rakehell who is in financial thrall to his uncle, an arch-reactionary exemplar of ruling class hauteur, as well as a hanging judge (the late Ian Richardson, nicely nasty in his last role). Austen and LeFroy meet in time-tested antipathy, in circumstances which suggest Austen’s famous novel Pride and Prejudice.

But, as if ordained, they’re soon kissing in a garden’s shadowed recesses. It’s about this juncture that the movie and the couple’s new romance take a graver turn. Young, penniless and living under the social and financial expectations of their families, their future together is severely challenged.

Before this turn, Becoming Jane sometimes seems to be mimicking Pride and Prejudice’s characters and Austen’s pointed observations in that book. Jane is shown writing pages in an early draft of the novel, and Hathaway voices lines from it. In truth, Austen was working on an early draft of Sense and Sensibility at this time, but it doesn’t lend itself to the movie’s purposes. Initially, the reluctant lovers are a reworked Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett from the later novel.

Hathaway and McAvoy make a handsome, winning and doomed couple (she’s a lot prettier than the historical Austen, he’s just about pretty enough), and if the fateful course of their affair is occasionally marked by anachronisms (women at an 18th-century prizefight, for example) it’s not very hard to respond to them with sympathetic suspension of skepticism.

Jarrold (Kinky Boots) keeps things moving along and he makes reasonable use of his superior supporting cast. Maggie Smith, in a role modeled after Pride and Prejudice’s haughty battle-ax, Lady Catherine DeBourgh and Julie Walters as Jane’s worried, marriage-minded mother, get more to do than the Harry Potter movies have permitted them.

Becoming Jane is a painless contribution to the swelling market in Austen-derived merchandise. Young women may well be drawn to its handsomely packaged combination of tragic romantic doings and a lesson in severely tested feminine will.

It’s a slick, well constructed example of chick flick historical romance whose pretentions are mostly held in check.