Becoming Jane
Director: Julian Jarrold
Cast: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith
Genre: Romance / Drama
Rated: PG
Review By:
Michael Dance
School:
NYU Tisch '07
Quote:
"...And hey, I met you. You are not cool." -Almost Famous
Becoming Jane
Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Click Here For Our Interview with Anne Hathaway
Becoming Jane
I'm in a complete no-win situation as I sit down here to write the review of Becoming Jane. Being a 22-year-old male who spent his adolescent years reading fantasy novels and watching Star Wars, I have about as little interest as possible in Jane Austen. I've never read Pride & Prejudice or any of her other books, and I don't have any plans to do so. I realize there are a lot of diehard fans out there (I've learned that they're called "Austenites,"Â and I'm not even making that up) and hey, more power to them. It's just not my thing, because I'm like…a guy.
So, predictably, Becoming Jane, which stars Anne Hathaway as a young Jane Austen, bored me to tears. All those highbrow British accents"¦all those corsets and outfits"¦all that oh-so-terrible-clever dialogue about dashing men and getting married"¦ugh. And therein lies my problem. I'm completely biased against these types of films. I'm the exact opposite demographic they're going for. So if my review of the film is a total pan, I feel like it would be unfair. But then again, if I tried to pretend I was really interested, it would be completely disingenuous.
The more I think about it, though, the more it seems like Becoming Jane won't be very satisfying to anyone. Essentially it's a love story that goes nowhere. I didn't know a thing about Austen's life when I went into this, but apparently it's a very well-known fact that she never married, which means this love story is not going to have a happy ending. To everybody else who didn't know that, I'm not trying to spoil anything; in fact, I think the movie will play better if you know her relationship with Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) was doomed from the start. Otherwise, you'd be like me, wondering what the heck the point of the movie was if the love story died out with an anti-climactic whimper.
The point, of course, is that the Jane Austen of the movies "becomes,"Â through this experience, Jane Austen, brilliant novelist. Get it? Becoming Jane? It's a fine concept, I'm not trying to bash the idea of a movie about Jane Austen becoming Jane Austen, but the love story we're presented with not only ends up a major comedown but is also pretty standard-issue.
Jane is a daughter and sister in the struggling Austen family led by James Cromwell and Julie Walters. She has a penchant for writing, and the movie of course has some fun with everyone desperately hoping that it's some kind of fad she'll grow out of: "can anything be done about it?"Â asks the befuddled Lady Gresham, sharply played by Maggie Smith. Her nephew
The movie's at its best when it's simply about these two young people in love and trying to be together (after the whole insult/courtship phase). At these points it's able to rely on the considerable charms and good looks of Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy, the former of whom, as far as I could tell, sported a solid British accent. They're both good actors and they sell the attraction, which makes the end of the movie all the more depressing; instead of being happy, they must look very pained all the time. Like they're constipated.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to live happily ever after at the end of every movie, and indeed it would be quite impossible here since they're basing it on a true story. But the whole movie feels pretty much like a Jane Austen story, which, along with every movie ever made, have trained us over and over again to believe that Love Conquers All. So when love, in this movie, is halted by a few logistical problems, it just seems"¦lame.
But even further than that, it actually succeeds in trivializing the motivations of a (presumably) great writer: Jane didn't get a happy ending, so she makes sure all the characters in her novels do. That's the end result of Becoming Jane; the movie doesn't seem to try to dig any deeper than that. I would totally dig the movie if it went for any honest insight into the mind of a writer; that is, after all, what I'm trying to do for a living here. But ultimately, it doesn't offer anything besides a shallow look at her own failed love affair.
As a sidenote, I don't know if this is the case in her finished pieces of work, but all of Jane's writing we hear in the movie essentially consists of about eighty-seven adjectives strung together, so much so that she even stops at one point and says to herself, "too many adjectives."Â
Movie Grade: C
Synopsis:
“Becoming Jane,” a romantic drama starring Anne Hathaway (“The Devil Wears Prada”), tells the true and surprising story of Jane Austen’s early years. The film also stars Maggie Smith, Julie Walters and James McAvoy (“Chronicles of Narnia”) and is directed by Julian Jarrold (“Kinky Boots”).
