Movie Review 2: Becoming Jane

By Anne Brodie Aug 3, 2007, 17:16 GMT

“Becoming Jane,” is the story of the great, untold romance that inspired a young Jane Austen, played by Anne Hathaway.  Willful and spirited, Jane is not ready to be tied down to anything but her writing. That is until she meets Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), a charming rogue from London who spends more time drinking and socializing than on his law studies. The film also stars Julie Walters, James Cromwell and ...more

This treacly tale of Jane Austen’s pre-fame life has much to recommend it, at first bite. 

Beautiful wardrobe, meticulous attention to detail, handsome stars, a true-life celebrity, magnificent stately homes and gob smacking countryside.

Anne Hathaway’s is a bewitching screen presence. She has elevated many treacly films in and is none the worse for wear. She does the job as Jane, hits her marks, delivers lines with as much gusto as she can summon and looks sensational, especially considering she must navigate those outfits.

Becoming Jane isn’t her fault.

The photogenic James McAvoy is Thomas Lefroy, a minor romantic interest in the real Austen’s life, here puffed up to massive proportions. He’s pretty good – he can’t help it – he’s always good, or pretty good. He is as engaging as Hathaway is and on paper, the whole affair looks scrumptious.

Not so.

The film is leaden, dead in the water, a led zeppelin, what? … a dud.
Okay so Becoming Jane is a behind-the-fame look at the life that led Austen to what she ‘became’, see.

Respectable women did not write or toss around witty barbs, clever aphorisms, disparaging remarks about love or anything else remotely interesting, the examined life, in short.

Not ‘No sensible woman would demonstrate passion, if the purpose were to attract a husband.’

The tension of the piece is that her parents don’t want her to write or marry for love. They would prefer that she marry money so Mrs. Austen no longer has to gather her own eggs. Seems father was a bit of a disappointment in the money department, and they married for love, ergo, love=poverty.

Austen may have met Thomas Lefroy once or twice in real life but that was about it, so the film is a construct, a contrivance coated in contemporary candy. I enjoyed the frou frou of it, but kept waiting for the weight of films based on her stories - Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park among them.

Hollywood/UK screenwriters may have wanted to think twice.

Becoming Jane does not gain momentum or importance; it fades away instead, with an unexpected change of tone that doesn’t help matters.

Jane Austen is one of the great pioneering authors, along with horror writer Ann Radcliffe, who inspires Austen in the course of the film, to defy social norms and do what the are driven to do - express themselves.

Becoming Jane is an After School Special in drag with a trumped up love story to bring the kids into the theatres.