Product: Becoming Jane [Blu-ray] (2007)
Rating: 4.0
"Jane Austen Confounded With Marianne Dashwood"
As many commentators here have already pointed out, the photography, period settings, costumes, and acting by all the characters in this fictional account of Jane Austen's development as a writer are beyond reproach. The excellence in these areas has garnered what may strike some readers as an excessively generous 4 stars, given the rest of the points to be discussed. The film IS beautiful to look at and entertaining in a Hollywood way, as long as one doesn't take it seriously as biography. Its shortcomings are not in its clothes, but in its soul.First of all, aficionados of Jane Austen, "the ironic little authoress," will probably regard the screenplay with some little ironic smirks of their own. To make Austen and her story attractive to contemporary persons, the writers include an unnecessary, oddly graphic scene of sexual play between Austen's aged parents as well as an instance of unlikely, pre-marital bedroom-sharing between brother Henry and his fiancee Eliza. Here, the writers, seeking to portray universal human nature, just pander instead to current soap opera taste by their inability to lift their focus above the imagined belts of these Regency period characters. Universality, as represented in these instances, is indistinguishable from "Hollywood, Forever!"More seriously, and far more damaging, the writers present a fictional Jane Austen endowed with much more sensibility than sense. In falling for "a reckless and penniless" lawyer, a kind of Restoration rake, she resembles imprudent Marianne Dashwood from "Sense and Sensibility" more than the likely Jane Austen avatar, passionate but wise sister Elinor, no doubt deemed by the writers, despite her wit, as too much a moralist for current taste. But a second's thought would surely make it clear that rescuing known drunk and wanton men from their ways doesn't seem to have been in actual life an Austen predilection. As a biographical surmise, it's simply counter-intuitive. Even more telling is the business involving the novel "Tom Jones. In the film the Lefroy character successfully uses the novel to soften Jane up romantically. What is part of the historical record, unfortunately, is the real Jane Austen's judgment on the Fielding novel. She declared that neither its wit nor its skillful character development "could atone for the low scale of morals in evidence throughout." Further, despite her own clear strictures against the marriage market of her time and its patent unfairness to women of brain and character but small fortune, Austen nevertheless declared that while "it was wrong to marry for money, it was foolish to marry with none." Such hard-headedness is evident to readers even in Austen's juvenilia, while it is most assuredly not the hallmark of the Bronte-like character the fetching Anne Hathaway has been called on to portray.Still more damaging, in the attempt to show how "real" life lies behind an author's creations, the writers include any number of crude, real-life parallels to events in Austen's works. Though none are as unwittingly hilarious as, say, that old Hollywood classic in which an impoverished and uninspired Beethoven picks up the opening of his Fifth Symphony from his grasping, rent-demanding landlord's continuous rapping at his door, they share with this example a disappointing inability to give due prominence to the large role a fertile imagination usually plays in any great artist's work.The film, again, is certainly worth watching, but it's good to give a wide berth to those who would proclaim that the spirit or character of the real Jane Austen is captured within it.