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The Jane Austen Book Club
by George Sax
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My gosh, the way they’ve been turning out product based on the life and work of that Jane Austen woman you could easily think her novels had some real merit! I mean, just look at all the Austen-type stuff that’s been on the market over the last 10 years or so: movies, TV shows, books—fiction and nonfiction. You don’t think there’s really something solid behind this Austen popularity, do you?
The characters in The Jane Austen Book Club, adapted by director Robin Swicord from the novel by Karen Joy Fowler, certainly think so. At its center are five LA-area women of varying ages and status who come together to discuss a different Austen novel each month. They’re joined by a token young man, Grigg (Hugh Dancey), who is initially clueless (wordplay alert!) and there because he’s stuck on one of the five, an “older woman,” Jocelyn (Maria Bello). She only invites him so he can distract her old friend, Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), who’s newly and sadly separated from her long-time husband (Jimmy Smits).
If you detect some faint correspondence between these people’s situations and those in Austen’s work, well, that’s probably what writer-director Swicord wants you to do. These four, and five or six others, are maneuvered through crude replications of the “general incivilities” that the movie’s epigrammatic quote from Austen identifies as the “essence of love.”
As it transpires, these correspondences are too forced or too inapparent, even if you know enough about Austen’s work to spy them. Austen soon becomes a plot device, something like Alfred Hitchcock’s once-famous McGuffins: pretexts for his plots without much greater significance.
Secord conducts her omnibus setups and plotting with efficient, gracefully inflected pacing, and the actors are sympathetically engaging. But only Grigg and Jocelyn’s at-cross-purposes relationship develops any real wit and interest among the various story lines.
The Jane Austen Book Club meets us cute and persists in mining that thin vein much too long.
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