Product: Becoming Jane [Blu-ray] (2007)
Rating: 4.0
The Struggle For Creation
Recently I reviewed a commercial film about the famous English writer and illustrator Ms. Beatrix Potter and mentioned there that, apparently, despite the very great cultural accomplishments of that woman the filmmakers could not resist centering the film on her love interests. I note that this is the case with the story line here as well. I also noted in "Ms. Potter" that I was not sure how faithfully the creators of that film were to the biography of Ms. Potter's life, however, for my purpose that it was neither here nor there. That is also the case here, as the creative work of Ms. Jane Austen needs no real defense. She had an almost unerring novelistic sense of the vices and virtues of the English gentry of the early 19th century. On its own terms this is a very appealing story line of an artist struggling to create work, a double struggle in the case of women in the early 19th century (and since then, as well), to have a creative life as well as social and personal life despite very heavy pressure to conform to the norms of bourgeois British society- meaning marriage and children. So kudos, Jane. And kudos for Ms. Elizabeth Bennett and all the others in those well-thought out novels.