Anne Hathaway becomes Jane Austen

Becoming Jane

Check listings for details

Revered literary queen Jane Austen has provided filmmakers with captivating cinematic material for decades. A number of recent adaptations have led to a cinematic reinvigoration of Austen’s work, resulting in not only box office gold, but critical acclaim as well. With no adaptations left to tackle, screenwriters Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood, and director Julian Jarrold have come up with a new concept, hoping to cash in on the cottage industry that has grown up around Jane Austen. Applying Austen’s literary creations to her own life, Becoming Jane plays fast and loose with the facts and sets Jane herself up as the original inspiration for the heroine in her most famous work, Pride and Prejudice.
    Though Austen imagined fanciful and passionate lives for her characters, she herself never married and died a spinster at the age of 41. Many biographers envisioned Austen’s life as sad and unfulfilled, but this film looks at her spinster existence as a result of an uncompromising will. Austen, played by the lovely Anne Hathaway, is a free-spirited, sharp-tongued young woman whose intelligence is seen as a hazard rather than a virtue. She meets a penniless Irish lawyer named Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), and soon they have fallen hopelessly in love. As all great love stories go, their romance will never be fully realized due to a melodramatic array of family and societal obligations. In her frustration, Austen’s life begins to take shape on the pages of her novel, with Lefroy and herself serving as inspiration for the characters Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth.
    Where films like Shakespeare in Love have had success posthumously fictionalizing the real life of an author, Becoming Jane falls short. The weak dialogue, painfully slow pacing and drearily uninspired visual style leaves McAvoy and Hathaway desperately trying to inject some light into a story that should be filled with luminosity. The film dissolves into a weak costume drama not even Austen would have deemed interesting enough to have written. Despite these hurdles, Hathaway and McAvoy both manage to pull off solid performances and demonstrate a simmering chemistry. This story would have worked better as a straight up biopic or a completely fantasized account; instead it is filled with literary references that are clumsy and unsatisfying. These fancifully envisioned stories are an interesting premise, but the haphazard style leads to an entirely wasted concept.