Ecce Femina (I think)
Written: Sep 22 '07
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Plot, writing, acting, costumes
Cons: I missed the first five or ten minutes.
The Bottom Line: See Jane fall in love with Tom. See Jane cry. See Jane do the right thing.
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| thewasp's Full Review: Becoming Jane |
"Becoming Jane" is totally fictitious, but perfectly believable. It takes one of the English language's best authors as a young woman and spins a love story for the ages about her.
The three elder boys having departed to seek their fortunes, only Jane (Anne Hathaway), her sister Cassandra, and her brothers George and Henry are still living with their father the Reverend Austen (the instantly recognizable James Cromwell) and mother Mrs. Austen (Julie Walters) by 1796. Despite the respectability that comes from being a man of the cloth, the Austens are poor, a fact which bears heavy on Mrs. Austen as she tries to make matches for her two girls. Cassandra willingly agrees to marry a young army chaplain, but Jane, rather like the heroine in her "Pride and Prejudice," resists the match her mother and powerful noblewoman Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith) are trying to make for her with Gresham's nephew, Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox).
Jane seems destined to be alone until into her life walks Anglo-Irish rogue Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy, under a different kind of stress than he was in "The Last King of Scotland"), a young lawyer and sometime boxer who was, needless to say, my favorite character in the film. Tom is a good friend of Henry and related to some neighbors of Jane's, to whose country house he is banished by his uncle (an ultra-Tory judge), upon whom Tom depends utterly, as his own family is even larger and poorer than the Austens. Tom's reaction to this news is to protest, "But they live in the country!", an odd thing to hold against someone in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when even London held barely half a million people. At first, he thinks Jane's literary compositions are interminable, even sleeping through the reading of one, leading her to denounce him vigorously in letters to her sister, who has taken a house on the coast in which to wait upon her fiance.
Predictably, however, the two gradually fall in love over the course of Tom's stay in Hampshire, and begin to scheme a way to get married despite their mutual poverty. Their first effort falls through when their plan to gradually win over Tom's uncle is dashed by a letter from a (then unknown) neighbor of Jane's, revealing that they are in love. His uncle cannot approve of Tom marrying a woman with no money and throws Jane, Henry, and Henry's girlfriend out of his house. Shortly thereafter, however, Tom decides (again predictably) to throw his responsibilities to the four winds; and Jane must face an agonizing choice.
The ending of this film, which skips forward somewhere between fifteen and twenty years, was enough to choke me up. This was mostly because it proved that Jane made the right choice. If you know anything about Jane Austen's life, you know what choice Jane makes; and if not, I want you to see the movie, so I'm not going to tell you. This would be an exquisite date movie; had it been showing in Gallup a week ago, I hope it would have occurred to me to take my date to it rather than "Superbad." "Superbad" is funny. "Becoming Jane" is unforgettable. Five stars.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Date Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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Epinions.com ID:
thewasp
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Member: Jason Galbraith
Location: Little Elm, Texas
Reviews written: 374
Trusted by: 63 members
About Me:
I am now a legal assistant working at a nonprofit which helps battered women.
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