Pride and
predictability

>> Jane Austen biopic Becoming Jane doesn’t escape the pitfalls of period-piece cliché

by MALCOLM FRASER

Everyone’s favourite chronicler of 19th-century English manners, Jane Austen, is an ongoing hot property. But with only six novels, and the most popular one, Pride and Prejudice, bled filmically dry (three adaptations in the last 12 years, four if you count the Bollywood quasi-spoof Bride and Prejudice), perhaps it was inevitable that an Austen biopic would eventually surface. Hence the horribly titled Becoming Jane (the gerund-plus-name title format demands to be put out of its, and our, misery).

Anne Hathaway plays the author, whose young womanhood, astute observers will note, bears copious resemblance to that of Pride and Prejudice heroine Lizzie Bennet. She lives on a country estate, with parents (Julie Walters and James Cromwell) who are desperately clinging to their limited finances and the middle-class respectability they bring, and who are thus enthusiastically trying to marry her off to a boring but rich young man (Laurence Fox), whose uppity crone of a mother (Maggie Smith) disapproves terribly of young Jane’s flippant humour and independent streak. In the middle of it all lands London lawyer Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), who strikes up a romance with the young writer, threatening to disrupt her respectable, ladylike existence.

Anyone making a period piece in this day and age faces a difficult challenge. In this particular setting, the pace of life was slow and people were obsessed with manners and propriety, which all adds up to not much excitement. Thus, a realistic depiction would be boring as hell, but attempts to inject contemporary sensibilities ring false. Here, director Julian Jarrold tries his damnedest to walk the tightrope, but takes a few stumbles on either side. Hathaway and McAvoy’s romance feels unrealistic (and indeed, though Lefroy is a true historical character, the love interest is a speculation), but it’s the only excitement in a story that’s otherwise plodding and predictable.

The cast is generally solid; Hathaway captures some of Austen’s barely repressed emotion, but her English accent and period manner aren’t totally on point. The most interesting thing about the film is how the drama illustrates the complexities of the British class system. But there’s nothing here that isn’t done better in one of Austen’s novels.

Becoming Jane opens
this Friday, Aug. 3

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