Becoming Jane
Beyond knowing that Jane Austen died at a young age and never married, I don’t know much about her life. After seeing Becoming Jane I probably still don’t. It is easy to imagine that the dramatic romantic turns presented in the movie were extrapolated from sparse evidence. So it is probably better to think of this movie as a Jane Austen novel brought to film, rather than a Jane Austen biography. And it succeeds, though of course with the caveat that unlike in her novels, this time the smart and attractive independent-thinking woman does not get happily hitched to the perfect man.
Anne Hathaway plays Austen, and while I am always initially distracted by her strikingly pronounced eyes and mouth, she did a good job and eventually (for me) disappeared into the role. The movie is populated by characters that are clearly meant to be the real-life inspiration for some of Austen’s most memorable fictional characters, primarily those in Pride and Prejudice. Happily, here they are rarely as absurd, with the possible exception of Maggie Smith’s meddling wealthy Aunt. Jane has two suitors that don’t suit her, but neither is as repugnant as Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice. Her mother is much more practical and reasonable than Elizabeth Bennett’s mother, and her father is not as dryly inspiring as his fictional counterpart. All this is to the better, so that while the passionate and ill-fated romance between Jane and Tom Lefroy (imagined here to be her real-life Mr. Darcy) feels fictional, the rest of the characters and the overall presentation of Austen’s life as she enters adulthood are a believable representation of what her life and world might have been like.
August 20th, 2007 at 4:14 am
Aw, you don’t mention James McAvoy… Very nice review though. You don’t give away too much and define exactly what the movie is.