The British stamp out these competent costume dramas like Toyota stamps out family sedans. As long as you don't mistake it for anything but fiction, Becoming Jane is a pleasant, undemanding afternoon's light entertainment. As the two leads Hathaway and McAvoy are charming, easy to look at and know their business, while Cromwell, Walters and Smith glide effortlessly through the principal supporting roles.
The movie's view that creative genius is no more than the recycling of experience is superficial; if that were so, there'd be a lot more brilliant novels than there are. It is nevertheless fun to spot the prefiguring of characters, plot points and even bits of dialogue from Austen's novels. Lady Catherine, Aunt Churchill and Mrs. Ferrars can all be carved out of Maggie Smith's old gorgon, and Mrs. Austen has the makings not so much of Mrs. Bennet as of Mrs. Jennings and Lady Russell in her hard earned worldly wisdom. Like the brood sow whom we are twice shown, Mrs. A has more offspring than means to provide for them, and she knows it.
The mainstream critics have all seized on the parallels with Pride and Prejudice, but I think that the relationship portrayed between Austen and Lefroy resembles a good deal more that between Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby -- a clever and articulate young man charms a headstrong, intelligent but impecunious young woman by recognizing and appealing to her intelligence, raises her expectations, dumps her because he needs money and she has none, and then professes self-loathing repentance.
At that point, experience has formed the Austen who wrote the novels, which is to say a spinster who had speculated unsuccessfully in the marriage market that she afterwords observed from an emotional distance as a spectator, with shrewd, penetrating and by no means kindly wit sugar coated with happy endings. The abandoned elopement could have been dispensed with -- its purpose is merely to soften the blow by making Austen more of an agent of her own fate than victim, and to justify Lefroy's mercenary conduct.
The movie's view that creative genius is no more than the recycling of experience is superficial; if that were so, there'd be a lot more brilliant novels than there are. It is nevertheless fun to spot the prefiguring of characters, plot points and even bits of dialogue from Austen's novels. Lady Catherine, Aunt Churchill and Mrs. Ferrars can all be carved out of Maggie Smith's old gorgon, and Mrs. Austen has the makings not so much of Mrs. Bennet as of Mrs. Jennings and Lady Russell in her hard earned worldly wisdom. Like the brood sow whom we are twice shown, Mrs. A has more offspring than means to provide for them, and she knows it.
The mainstream critics have all seized on the parallels with Pride and Prejudice, but I think that the relationship portrayed between Austen and Lefroy resembles a good deal more that between Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby -- a clever and articulate young man charms a headstrong, intelligent but impecunious young woman by recognizing and appealing to her intelligence, raises her expectations, dumps her because he needs money and she has none, and then professes self-loathing repentance.
At that point, experience has formed the Austen who wrote the novels, which is to say a spinster who had speculated unsuccessfully in the marriage market that she afterwords observed from an emotional distance as a spectator, with shrewd, penetrating and by no means kindly wit sugar coated with happy endings. The abandoned elopement could have been dispensed with -- its purpose is merely to soften the blow by making Austen more of an agent of her own fate than victim, and to justify Lefroy's mercenary conduct.