Product: Becoming Jane [Blu-ray] (2007)
Rating: 4.0
Anne Hathaway as Jane in a movie that is clearly "Austen in Love"
The premise of "Becoming Jane" is relatively simple, to wit: turn Jane Austen's life into a Jane Austen novel. The problem is that Austen's life was not like one of her novels: the author died at the age of 41 having never married. But we know from her letters that the young Austen flirted with a man named Thomas Langlois Lefroy in 1796 when she was 21 and at the mid-point of her life. Given that it is rather depressing to think that the greatest romance writer of all time lived a life devoid of romance the script by television writers Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams takes that fact and germinates it into the idea that Lefroy was indeed the great love of Austen's life, with Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy as the star-crossed couple. After all, Austen only wrote six complete novels and we want more.We know that Austen wrote her initial version of "Pride and Prejudice" between 1796 and 1797, entitled "First Impressions" at that point (the revised novel was not published under 1813). This 2007 film follows the conventional wisdom (or wishful thinking) that Austen is most like her heroine Elizabeth Bennett in "Pride and Prejudice." Like Elizabeth, Jane has a mother who wants to see her married, a father who wants her to be happy, a beloved older sister, and a proposal from an unwanted suitor. But "Becoming Jane" wants to suggest that while Elizabeth ended up with Mr. Darcy, Jane herself was smitten with a bad boy like Wickham. To be fair, Tom Lefroy is more like Willoughby in "Sense and Sensibility" in terms of extenuating situation, if not character, but he is clearly a bad boy waited to be tamed by the young woman who would go on to be one of the most celebrated and important novelists of all-time (in terms of importance I would put Austen on a tiny pedestal with Cervantes and James Joyce).The obvious comparison here is to "Shakespeare in Love," with strong parallels between the plot of the movie and those of a couple of plays. There are references to various works by Austen throughout the film (e.g., Jane meets Ann Radcliffe, the author of popular Gothic novels that Austen satirized in writing "Northanger Abbey"). The more you know about Austen the more you will enjoy such elements, but perhaps the less likely to enjoy a fictional version of her love life. However, because Austen is a novelist and not a playwright, "Becoming Jane" is denied the (literally) dramatic finish of the film that won the Best Picture Oscar in 1999. Still, this movie does come up with an emotional ending, taking advantage of another historic fact to give us something to cry about before the final credits, to make up for the fact that we were never going to get the "incandescent" ending of an actual Jane Austen novel.Unconcerned as I am by such concerns as accents and posture, I found Hathaway to be well cast as the Jane Austen I would like to see on screen, equal measure intelligence and spunk in the face of a society that well deserves her ironic critique. McAvoy is serviceable as the man who lets Jane get away, but that makes it hard to really warm up to his character, especially once it becomes clear he has more to do with the bad boys of Austen's novels. The supporting cast features Julie Walters and James Cromwell as Jane's parents, Maggie Smith as Lady Gresham, and Ian Richardson as Judge Langlois. However, the supporting player I liked the most was Laurence Fox as Mr. Wisley, the young man who gets down on bended knee and proposes to Jane. He is dismissed as a "booby," but it is clear that no man is really good enough for our girl. But Mr. Wisley is nothing like the obsequiese Mr. Collins from "Pride and Prejudice," and in his final conversation with Jane delivers the most telling line in the film. A more telling point would be that neither Wisley nor Collins appears to be like Harris Bigg-Wither, who proposed to Austen in 1802, a final reminder that "Becoming Jane" is biographical fiction and not just a fictional biography.