Austen powers

>> Writer-director Robin Swicord on
human behaviour, literature and
The Jane Austen Book Club

by MATTHEW HAYS

Jane Austen adaptations have been plentiful over the past two decades, with names like Ang Lee and Gwyneth Paltrow wading into lofty literary territory. For the record, the best one I can think of is Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s resetting of Emma to Beverly Hills in the ’90s.

But with her new film, writer-director Robin Swicord has done a smart thing: she’s taken many of the themes and ideas that Austen so famously handled and placed them in a contemporary setting. She does this via a book club premise, in which a few women and one man gather around to discuss nothing other than the potent work of Austen. The Jane Austen Book Club—based on the bestselling novel by Karen Joy Fowler—sounds like it would really tank, but the good news is that Swicord landed a super ensemble cast and keeps things away from the kind of treacle that could have easily ruined everything.

Discussing the film at the Toronto International Film Festival, Swicord says everything about Austen seemed pertinent to today’s culture. “Technology has changed things now. We’re often less connected. But people feel the need for that connection, and I think that’s one of the reasons so many book clubs have popped up. People are looking to create their own villages.”

Swicord’s screenplay has the characters delve into Austen as they navigate their way through their own soapy dilemmas. Amy Brenneman plays a woman who’s reeling after being left by her husband (Jimmy Smits) after 32 years of marriage. Maria Bello is a solitary figure who has never married and prefers to tend to her dog-breeding business. Maggie Grace has a tortured bond with her lesbian girlfriend.

“I had a very strong sense of who all these people were,” Swicord says of her characters. “I knew I needed strong actors—I had to find the right people. There were 37 locations, to be shot in little time, on $6-million. I was given the freedom to cast how I wanted to by Sony Classics. Once I got this incredible cast, my work was almost done. They have been so fine.”

Infidelity and other romantic complications were an Austen specialty, and Swicord saw the author’s ruminations on codes of human behaviour as even more invigorating when applied to contemporary characters. “Her father was an Anglican pastor. The Anglican values were really upheld in her family. This was an underpinning of all of her novels. She was very much concerned with moral and ethical behaviour. She believed in the rational mind over the impulsive.”

After several screenplays, including Memoirs of a Geisha, Swicord was thrilled to assume the director’s chair. “Yes, there are still fewer women directors, for sure. It’s taken some time, and I’ve wanted to direct for a long while. When I first got to New York in the late ’70s I said I wanted to direct and people told me I could be a script girl. There just wasn’t much of a model for that. There is now. There are a number of women directors.

“It used to be that people would talk about women doctors. They don’t say that anymore, because now women doctors are so common. That’s changed—and I’m confident it will in the film business as well.”

The Jane Austen Book Club
opens This Friday, Oct. 5

>> Movie Listings