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Becoming Jane

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

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,” 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,” 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