วันจันทร์ที่ 16 พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. 2552

becoming jane (2007)


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It's a movie biography of the sort that attempts to find creative inspiration in the very life of Jane Austen.
By CanWest News ServiceAugust 2, 2007

The misty hills, the green trees, the sound of birdsong. A stream. A farm. A beautiful young woman sitting at her window. Yes, we are in Jane Austen territory — hip deep in it, one might say — in Becoming Jane, a movie biography of the sort that attempts to find creative inspiration in the very life of the creator. Jane Austen, this movie says, lived inside a Jane Austen novel, albeit one with a more bittersweet ending than the real Jane would have allowed.

The result is a mixture of charm — who doesn’t want a new Jane Austen story? — and calculation — who needs a mock Jane Austen story? — that probably misstates the creative impulse but nevertheless allows us to bask in the fiction that we are seeing the real Mr. Darcy court the real Elizabeth Bennet in the real life of a favourite author.

The film stars Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada), whose thin, full-lipped beauty accounts for the stampede of proposals inflicted upon the movie’s Jane. The daughter of “an obscure, impecunious clergyman” (James Cromwell), she is a spirited young woman whom everyone is trying to marry off to the wealthy but decidedly wet Mr. Wisely (Laurence Fox.) Jane, however, will not marry without affection. Cue Tom Lefroy (The Last King of Scotland’s James McAvoy), a roistering young Irish rake and penniless lawyer — a rather charming notion, but apparently they existed in 19th century England — who will become her Mr. Darcy, the self-important, insufferable cad with whom she will nonetheless fall madly in love.

The “obscure, impecunious” reference comes from Lady Gresham, Mr. Wisely’s wealthy aunt, who is played by Maggie Smith as if she were auditioning for The Importance of Being Earnest. She’s a sour dowager with a dry impatience with all that does not meet her standards (told that Jane is writing, she asks, “Can nothing be done about it?”)

Like several characters in Becoming Jane, she is both engaging and overly familiar; the model for Lady Catherine of Pride and Prejudice or any of a number of stories about worthy young people making their way into the aristocracy, with which English literature is peppered.

The movie has a false sense of the creative instinct — the author’s imagination is rarely so closely tied to her actual life — but a nice sense of what it is we want in our fables.

Becoming Jane, like much of Austen’s oeuvre, concerns itself in the end with the question of money. Young Jane has none; Mr. Wisely can get his hand on lots; poor Tom is subject to the whims of a rich uncle (Ian Richardson), a domineering magistrate who would be at home in a Dickens novel.

A key moment in Becoming Jane comes when Tom brings Jane home for his uncle’s blessing, only to see them get into an argument about the role of irony in modern life. Jane believes it is formed of conflicting truths that marry to form a new truth, one told with humour. The judge believes it is “insult with a smiling face.” Hathaway is far too pretty for Jane, but the character has the kind of feminist backbone that we always suspected of the author.

McAvoy, on the other hand, seems like a sketch for Mr. Darcy (or at least for Colin Firth), a slightly feckless hero whose manly high spirits seem forced. He hardly seems like the prize-fighter he is pictured to be, and the devil-may-care texture of a scene where he plays cricket with Jane, then runs through the woods to the lake for a skinny dip, must be taken mostly on faith. Austen had a real Lefroy in her life, but their relationship was probably not more than a flirtation; Becoming Jane makes it sexy.

Director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots) tells this story in a style that gives us an all-too-authentic taste of the slowness of courtship at the time. At the end, Jane has been given the plot of Pride and Prejudice pretty much on a platter and she is embarked on the career that will produce six classic novels. “My characters will have, after a bit of trouble, all that they desire,” she declares. That, judge, is irony.

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