Love that Destroys Itself
Written: Aug 11 '07 (Updated Aug 12 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A must-see for Austenites and a good (but not great) costume drama for general viewers
Cons: The script's density of characters and ideas result in a single viewing being insufficient
The Bottom Line: Highly recommended for Austenites. Recommended for most female viewers. Moderately recommended for the general audience of movie-goers.
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| metalluk's Full Review: Becoming Jane |
Tonight, I went out on a double-date by myself. I scooted over to Androscoggin County here in Maine for a solo dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant and then met up with my date, Jane Austen, at a movie theater in Auburn. Then, I sat through the film (Becoming Jane) a second time, making it a double-date. That's ironic because (as this film makes explicit) irony is the bringing together of two contradictory truths in order to create a higher truth. Love of irony was one of the several driving forces in Jane Austen's artistic vision.
Let's set the record straight on one matter right off. This film is not at all a biopic – for two distinct reasons. First, it plays fast and loose with the facts of Austen's life, spinning a fictional story around fragmentary details. Second, the film does not attempt to sketch Austen's life over its entire brief course of forty-one years, or even the adult portion of it. Instead, the film's story (other than a brief flash-forward at the end) can be surmised to have transpired over the course of a few months during Austen's twentieth year of life. How many great historical figures could be described biographically in any meaningful way by relating a brief episode from their twentieth year of life? This film is clearly not intending to be about the business of biography.
Background: Although Austen's life history is well-documented to the extent of knowing when she lived in various places, who she lived with at various stages of her life, the names and relative ages of her parents and siblings, and the identity of some of her suitors, relatively little is known about her personal thoughts or feelings, except in so far as these can be deduced from her six novels and a few surviving letters. Nor is much known definitively about her literary inspirations and influences. Becoming Jane is essentially a speculation about some of the kinds of experiences Jane Austen could have had, as a young woman, which might have then found later expression in her works. I see no problem with writers exercising this kind of artistic license.
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England on December 16th, 1775, the youngest of seven children (five boys and two girls). Unsurprisingly, Austen was especially close to her only sister, Cassandra. Austen began writing when she was just twelve years of age and completed her first novel, called Elinor and Marianne, in 1796, at age twenty-one. It was Austen's habit to revise her unpublished work repeatedly and Elinor and Marianne gradually evolved into Sense and Sensibility, which was finally published in 1811. Similarly, First Impressions, completed in its first form in 1797, gradually evolved into Pride and Prejudice, not published until 1813. So, in conception and broad contours, these two stories were the work of a young woman of just twenty-one or twenty-two years of age, though some of the refinements of plot, language, and concepts reflect a more mature artist and woman. So, in choosing to spin a story about Austen at age twenty, the authors of Becoming Jane are honing in on the phase of her life most relevant to her first two novels.
The Story: In brief, Jane Austen is a young woman living with her family in the English countryside. She aspires to be a writer at a time when few women had literary aspirations and the few that did were scorned. She has acquired the attentions of the well-heeled but tiresome Mr. Wisley, nephew of Lady Gresham, as well as the odious Mr. Warren, her father's student. Jane, however, is determined not to enter into a marriage of convenience, without genuine affection for her would-be partner. She's seen quite enough of loveless marriage in the form of her own parents. Jane's life takes an exciting turn with the arrival of the bawdy and mischievous Thomas Lefroy, after he is banished from London, due to his improprieties, by his wealthy uncle. The relationship between Austen and Lefroy begins as a clash of egos, but gradually blossoms into passionate romance. Lefroy's uncle will have none of it, however, and Jane's mother is intent on her accepting the proposal of Mr. Wisley. Meanwhile, Jane's brother Henry pursues the wealthy Contessa Eliza De Feuillide, while sister Cassandra's fiancée, Robert Fowle, goes off to war.
Themes: It's amazing how many reviewers of this film state categorically that Jane's love interest in the film, Thomas Lefroy, later provided the inspiration for the character Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Actually, this film is making another kind of point altogether. Becoming Jane advances the idea that the various characters in Austen's novels were amalgams formed from bits and pieces of the various people in Austen's life. At the same time, the major players in Austen's real life, including Jane herself, each encompassed characteristics of several of the literary characters. Thomas Lefroy, for example, while exhibiting a few of Darcy's qualities, is far more reminiscent of Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice and, especially, John Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Thomas Lefroy is portrayed as a dashing, reckless, and romantic figure, none of which characteristics aptly describe Mr. Darcy. Lefroy, like Willoughby, is dependent on the support of a wealthy relative, abandons a passionate relationship with the female lead, and becomes engaged to another for financial reasons. Ironically (that notion again), Lefroy is much less akin to Darcy than is Mr. Wisley, the suitor rejected by Austen in the present film. Wisley and Darcy share the same awkward reticence but also the same sincerity, genuine sensitivity to the woman's well-being, and respect for her aspirations and talents. Unlike Darcy, Wisley fails to find a means of overcoming the lady's objections.
Similarly, several critics suggest a great deal of similarity between the way Jane Austen is depicted in this film and her foremost female protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, from Pride and Prejudice. Instead, the script writers have taken great pains to illustrate how the twenty-year-old Jane Austen might have encompassed aspects of the irresponsible younger sister Lydia, as well as elements of Elizabeth Bennet. Or, taking the characters of Sense and Sensibility, the present film suggests a Jane Austen experiencing some of the emotional turmoil of sister Marianne, in her reckless attachment to a dashing but undependable suitor, before later turning into a model for Elinor (the sister with sense) through an epiphany near the film's conclusion. Becoming Jane is far truer to the artistic process practiced by most writers than what most critics are suggesting. Literary characters are typically constructed from bits and pieces of real people in the author's life, rather than by the wholesale transfer of a single individual. Becoming Jane hammers away at this central point about the relationship between an author's life experiences and their literary creations, yet most reviewers are getting only a distorted and simplified version of the idea. Small wonder, then, that other thematic points presented more subtly are lost altogether on most viewers and critics.
At first, I balked at the idea that Jane Austen could have encompassed aspects of both Eliza Bennet and Lydia Bennet. After all, in Pride and Prejudice, Eliza vigorously disapproves of Lydia's unguarded, flirtatious behavior that exposes her entire family to censure and ridicule. Austen, I thought, could have been like one or the other of these two markedly different sisters, but could not have been like both. Then I remembered that we are imagining a youthful Jane Austen, at age twenty. How many of us engage in behaviors when we are sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty that, taken in retrospect, seem contrary to the person we later became at, say, age thirty or forty? How many of us exhibited contradictions and inconsistencies of personality and activities when we were in those years before our personalities and values were fully formed?
One of the special characteristics of Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, that truly sets her apart from most female protagonists in literature is her love for what today we call "psychologizing." Elizabeth tells Darcy, for example, that she is hoping to sketch his character, by which she means trying to understand his motivations and values. Elizabeth, we learn, is blessed with a perspicacity that allows her to succeed pretty well in her understanding of the often amusing people in her life – except, of course, when she is blinded by prejudice. In her capacity for psychological insight, Elizabeth, of course, resembles her creator. Part of Austen's brilliance as a writer was a keenly developed capacity to probe and reveal the motivations of her complex characters. Appropriately, the climactic moment in Becoming Jane follows directly from a flash of insight, as Austen suddenly comprehends that love that destroys a family must also ultimately destroy itself. At that moment, we imagine, Austen becomes the Jane Austen that readers know and love, with her actions now governed more by a search for truth and understanding than by unbridled romantic passions. That lesson is essentially the same one that Austen shared with the world in Sense and Sensibility. When wise Elinor asks Marrianne, "Do you compare your conduct with his [Willoughby's]," Marianne replies, "No, I compare it with what it ought to have been. I compare it with yours." Though Austen rejected the arbitrariness of Regency standards of decorum, she came to understand that raw passions are best governed by sound judgment and penetrating insight.
Perhaps the film's main weakness is that one really has to have a thorough understanding of Austen's novels, especially the first two, to understand the present film's most interesting ideas. That means that the film is most suited for Austen aficionados and likely has little potential for winning new converts. There are also a lot of characters in the film, making it easy to miss significant aspects of the story on a single viewing. I would have rated this film at 3.5 stars (out of five) after the first viewing, but my rating for it increased to 4 stars based on the additional value derived from a second viewing.
Production Values: Director Julian Jerrold has had considerable experience directing costume dramas for British television. For Becoming Jane, he maintains good pace and elicits nuanced performances from his cast. As a costume drama, this film is excellent, though not, perhaps, as fine as the best of its competitors. The cinematography was likewise very good, yet not as inspired as in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
As with nearly every romantic film, the two lead characters carry much of the weight of responsibility for the film's success or failure. Anne Hathaway was a controversial choice to play Jane Austen, especially for Brits, many of whom did not take kindly to a Yank playing one of the icons of British literature. Hathaway manages a pretty good facsimile of an English accent, however. I liked her portrayal of Austen as well as her chemistry with the male lead, James McAvoy. Hathaway is still something of a neophyte as an actress, but her previous credits include Nicholas Nickleby (2002), The Princess Diaries 2 (2004), and Brokeback Mountain (2006). She'll be appearing in Get Smart and Passengers in 2008. James McAvoy is presently riding a wave of critical acclaim for such films as The Last King of Scotland (2006), The Chronicles of Narnia (2005), and Shameless (2004). He and Hathaway do an exceptional job in the present film deepening the emotional resonance of their interactions through glances, sighs, and a rich variety of facial expressions. Still, it was hard for me personally to understand why Hathaway's character preferred the reckless Lefroy to the reliable and sensitive Mr. Wisley – but what do I know of women's tastes in men?
The supporting cast is stellar, from top to bottom. The Austen parents are played by two old pros, Julie Walters (the various Harry Potter films, as Mrs. Weasley, Billy Elliot, Educating Rita) and James Cromwell (The Longest Yard, Salem's Lot, and Deep Impact). Maggie Smith (also in the Harry Potter films, as Professor Minerva McGonagall) plays the domineering Lady Gresham. I particularly liked Laurence Fox as Mr. Wisley, Lady Gresham's nephew and would-be suitor of Jane Austen. Joe Anderson was excellent as Austen's brother Henry. Henry's main squeeze, Contessa Eliza De Feuillide, was played, ironically, by Jennifer Ehle look-alike, Lucy Cohu. There's an affecting performance turned in by Philip Culhane as the deaf-mute Austen son, George.
In my best judgment, it is the script, written by Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams, which weighs most heavily in defining this film's merits and demerits. On the one hand, it is a highly intelligent script that makes some insightful points about Jane Austen's creative muse and the artistic process in general; on the other hand, the script is so dense with characters and sophisticated ideas that much of its value will be lost on the average viewer, especially if their exposure to the film is limited to a single viewing. How should critics weigh the value of a film? By the response of an average viewer seeing the film for the first time or the response of a sophisticated viewer enjoying the film for the tenth time and continuing to find new layers of meaning? This film, in my opinion, will succeed more in the latter respect than the former. Hood and Williams have seemingly overestimated the intelligence of the movie-going audience. A second "problem" is that, unlike the best of the Austen adaptations, the language is mostly not that of Austen herself, with its incomparable beauty and incisiveness.
Bottom-Line: Foremost among the criticisms being leveled at this film, by critics and Austenites alike, is that it is not a different film altogether. Many who treasure Jane Austen's novels and have at least a vague notion about her personal history would love to see a genuine Austen biopic. Certainly, her story could provide an excellent film of that kind. One need look no further than the recent film Miss Potter, designed around the blossoming of another outstanding female British author, Harriet Potter, for a general blueprint for how Austen's life story could be treated in a manner that could be simultaneously truthful, inspiring, and entertaining. The single most important point that could be made about Jane Austen is that she was one of the greatest writers in the English language, regardless of gender, despite enormous obstacles of opportunity and circumstances. Then, the second most important point is that Austen was a feminist at a time when the very notion of feminism had yet to fully form. Austen and the best of her female protagonists have been inspiring girls and young women for many generations, as I've personally observed with two of my own daughters. On the one hand, it is deplorable when the life-story and novels of one of history's greatest proto-feminists are used as fodder for the notion that women's lives are defined by their relationships with men – their fathers, husbands, lovers, and sons. The ending of Joe Wright's 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice had something of that effect by reducing the vibrant, intelligent, and independent-minded Elizabeth to simply "Mrs. Darcy." It was an egregious insult to the proto-feminist implications inherent in the greatest of Austen's novels.
Becoming Jane has some of that same effect by suggesting that an early, passionate relationship with a man, Tom Lefroy, was the defining experience in Austen's life. The film would even have us believe that Lefroy, whose knowledge of Austen's intellectual life was paltry, provided key points of guidance in Austen's artistic development. Apparently, many modern men (and women?) still aren't ready to embrace the idea that a woman might develop into a great personage mainly through the evolution of her own intrinsic nature, without the primary agency of a man. One contrary point I can make, in defense of the artistic integrity of Becoming Jane, is that this film was not portraying the fully-formed, mature, and accomplished Jane Austen, but a youthful incarnation of her being as a burgeoning twenty-year-old. How many autonomous, self-actualized women of any era can claim to have already been so when they were just twenty years of age? Some of those today who can fairly make that claim may owe it, in part, to the likes of Jane Austen, but Austen herself had few comparable female role models from whom to draw inspiration. Still, one hopes that the life story of Jane Austen will some day be told as the fundamentally feminist story that it clearly was. That, however, wasn't an objective suitable for this particular film. As a film critic, I believe in judging a film against its own intents and, on that basis, I rate this film at four stars.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Date Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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