Product: Becoming Jane [Blu-ray] (2007)
Rating: 1.0
Incredibly boring
I should have figured out why my local library has 25 copies of this film available for borrowing -- I'd say that they bought 5 of them and the others were donations by patrons who also purchased and discovered how bad the film is. Not that it isn't a quality production, but it's very boring. I'm merely extremely sorry that I purchased it (the library will now have 26 copies!). The first half of the film is shot in choppy, one to two minute scenes, which isn't helpful since the background of the film isn't established. You are thrown into Austen's family without any introduction of who is who. One point is a brother who seems mentally challenged until near the end you discover he is deaf (when Jane does sign language with him, although I wonder if it was invented then?). The film isn't Austin-esque either. Within the first few minutes, her parents do some weird sex thing in bed, preparing you for more lewdness later when the "hero" is introduced, a young man of low morals, hardly someone we'd expect Jane to find admirable. Yet she falls for him over about twenty minutes of snippy bickering (some of which you can't hear over the loud soundtrack). I must have fallen asleep at some point, for suddenly she and this man are professing their love for each other. The man, though, is rather unheroic, the actor being kind of puny and peculiar looking. In the second half, when Jane is rejected as his fiance, the film gets more interesting as it probes real emotion and character depth, as well as the problems of being poor or nearly so in a money-driven, elitist world -- something that many of us can relate to today. The only interesting character in the film is Austen's second suitor, who reveals himself as her intellectual and moral equal, giving her a hope of future happiness, since real and mature love is quite a lot of fun, actually. But he's rejected, as we know from Austen's biographies, in favor of remaining single. Austen comes off as a little silly in this respect, being willing to run off with a penniless brat while turning away from an established and well-rounded man. Sad to say, Anne Hathaway's performance as Austen is drab. She is a fine actress, capable of a great deal more, but I suspect the direction crushed her spirit and talents. She is most often found writing, and there is a show of her editing habit, which is to cut out words with a pair of scissors, making her letters and manuscripts look like they've gone through CIA censorship. I believe this is played for laughs but isn't really funny. This could have been a fine and meaningful film, a depiction of Jane's environment that subsequently became her literature, but I have to say that its potential is never reached. Instead, the film was worthy of its failure at the box office. Not something Austenites would appreciate, not something for the general audience either.