With each of Jane Austen’s mere six novels having been adapted for the screen in recent years, some of them more than once, the burgeoning market in all things Jane has widened to encompass modern reworkings (Bride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary), and now this imagined biography. (Forthcoming will be The Jane Austen Book Club, the novel adaptation that beatifies the 190-years-dead author as a continuing font of inspiration, or at least a good excuse for gossiping over coffee.) Extrapolated from references in letters, it uses a rumored romance with a young lawyer as the basis for a movie that is very like a Jane Austen adaptation, especially like Pride and Prejudice. The Jane here, played by Anne Hathaway, is forthright, independent-minded, and plucky, though within societal norms. She is given the familiar choice between wealthy but dull and poor but exciting. For about five minutes she pretends, or thinks herself, to be offended by the lawyer’s brash manner and superior attitude. (A “metropolitan” young man, he has been sent by his uncle to stay in the the country where Jane resides with her parents and siblings.) The transition from supposed offense to romantic attraction is perfunctory, less convincing than her heroine’s similar transition in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. The rest of the movie plays out the war of practicality and passion. I couldn’t help but feel that had the author herself scripted it her triumphs would have felt a little more triumphant and her heartbreaks more heartbreaking. The movie is a nice trifle for the Jane junkie, but not up to most of the adaptations of her own novels.
IMDB link
reviewed 9/06/07
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