Review

Review Date: 5-August-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Becoming Jane (2007)

Becoming Jane speculates that before attaining the status of celebrated author, the young Jane Austen experienced an incandescent romance which spurred her artistic passion. It's a tough proposition because everyone interested in seeing the movie will be aware that Austen died unwed and quite young; ergo, no happy ending and a lot of construction to do. Not surprisingly, the picture depresses without fully justifying its existence. The acting, staging, and direction are good, yet I think to enjoy it one would have to be an Austen enthusiast or a firm believer that it is better to have lost in love than never to have loved at all.

Saucer-eyed Anne Hathaway embodies the heroine just as her talent, sexuality, and adulthood are blooming. The youngest daughter of a rural minister, she commands social respectability but very little money. Courted by the quiet, enigmatic nephew (Laurence Fox) of the locally revered noblewoman (Maggie Smith), Jane cannot commit to a marriage without "affection," a late-eighteenth-century euphemism for loin-scorching, brain-addling love. Naturally she finds this sacred commodity where she least expects it, in the person of London roué Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), who has been banished to the country by his conservative uncle and guardian. Tom goads Jane from the get-go, excited by her intellect, independence, and ignorance of adventure and romance. What they lack in shared experience they make up for in shared sensibility. She steals the first kiss after their hearts are already lost.

But as anybody who has read Austen knows, love and marriage in the old days were a bitch. (Better to be an outright peasant; at least you could freely pick a partner in suffering.) It is horrifying to contemplate the necessity of plotting stratagems to hook a husband (for a woman), of shouldering sole financial responsibility for a family and servants (for a man), and of settling for the mate which society deems the best you can get (for both). Becoming Jane must finesse a story that covers these bases while painting the lovers in the finest light possible so as not to insult the literary legend. It does this rather lugubriously, with repeated roadblocks and emotional wrenches. Were Hathaway not so sincere-looking and McAvoy not so irresistible, one might be tempted to dismiss their tragedy as overdone. In fact, the film is a sad bit of fiction which explains a famous writer's spinsterhood where perhaps no explanation is needed.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.