Product: Becoming Jane [Blu-ray] (2007)
Rating: 4.0
"Affection is desirable. Money is INDISPENSIBLE."
I'll make this short and sweet: You need to see this film. But not for the reason you think. I won't go into the ethical quandries of fictionalizing a real person's life, and whether it is right to make a film about a real person and have that person do things for which there is only speculation and no hard evidence. I don't know if Jane Austen would like this. But I do know what she would like. His name is James McAvoy. More on him in a moment."Becoming Jane" is based on some historical detective work that suggests Jane Austen loved a man named Tom Defroy, and took her creative inspiration from their love. It can't be proven because Jane's sister Cassandra burned all of Jane's more private letters. It is thought among some that Jane must have had romance in her life to be able to so beautifully write about it, but still we can't ever really know.The film itself is lovingly shot and well written dialogue-wise, with characters talking convincingly for the time period and spouting Austian observations that most of the time manage to be witty. There are proto-types of Austen's most famous characters, a Lady DeBourgh-type and a really irritating Lydia forerunner. Anne Hathaway plays the lady herself, and here is a sticking point: If you don't particularly like Hathaway (I don't), she won't win you over. She isn't embarassing, but she doesn't hit it out of the ball park the way Keira Knightly unexpectantly did in "Pride and Prejudice" a while back. She's okay. Everyone else does their job well. And then there is James McAvoy.I went to this film for James. He is the most alive actor working in film today; every second he is onscreen he's is doing something, reacting to something, letting us see his thoughts. He's sexy, charming, and heartbreaking. He embodies Tom Lefroy to perfection, even when the screenplay and Hathaway don't help him out much. His scene with Hathaway in the inn is stunning: he makes us feel the panic of a man about to lose his reason for breathing. When he is onscreen the film crackles, when he is off it goes flat and we miss him (this is used to delightful effect in the ball scene) and I will buy the film for him.The movie has narrative problems (it's almost as if scenes in the middle were cut) and occasional cheesy obviousness (lots of famous Austen lines spoken by her friends and family), but overall it's well done; a flawed movie worth seeing for a great performance. It might have happened, you never know. The theater I was at had two hundred people lined up to see it. The idea that "Pride and Prejudice" was a love letter to a man the author adored is an fascinating one. Maybe that's why the story endures.GRADE: A-/B+