Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane is really kind of a bore. Based on the early life of Jane Austen, this 2007 film assumes a generally unproven relationship between Austen and Thomas Langlois Lefroy. The screenplay was based around real events, for the most part, and author Jon Spence, who wrote Becoming Jane Austen, served as a consultant on the picture. Two other biographers of Jane Austen confirm the existence of the Lefroy/Austen relationship, so an alleged historical basis is good enough for me.
Regardless of how accurate Becoming Jane is or turns out to be, it is still a rather slow-moving film. Anne Hathaway stars as Jane, the younger daughter of Reverend Austen (James Cromwell) and his wife (Julie Walters). Jane wants to become a writer, which endlessly bothers her mother and endlessly pleases her father. Jane spends a good deal of time turning down the affections of various potential suitors. She’s disappointed in the courtship practices of the time and disdains that the idea of marriage is all about money and status. She wants to marry for love, after all, and desires affection.
Along comes young Lefroy (James McAvoy). Lefroy is a rough-and-tumble lawyer with a bad reputation. He’s also arrogant and, at first, precious Jane can’t stand the brute. Eventually, however, she gives in to his charms and a romance begins to bud. Jane and Lefroy can’t be together for a number of reasons and the politicking of family dynamics soon takes its hold over both of our star-crossed lovers. Becoming Jane focuses more on the journey of Jane to be with Lefroy than it does on the journey for Jane to actually “become” Jane Austen.
The thing about Jane Austen and her works is that her followers and her fans don’t analyze her books to death; they simply love them. It is true that Austen’s influence on the world is profound, as Pride and Prejudice serves as the basic blueprint for our romantic films and her other works are still selling like hotcakes. So finding the ideal actress to play such an influential author was a bit of an uphill climb, I’m sure. With Hathaway, the choice wound up being a good one. Sure, her accent is not overly convincing and she may stumble somewhat through the role, but she has a profound likeability that is virtually unmatched among modern actresses. That plays out very well for her in this film and makes even the most boring of sequences a bit more tolerable.
James McAvoy is quickly developing into a favourite of mine, too, and he was quite good here. He plays the ragamuffin role rather well and it is pleasing to see the chemistry between his Lefroy and Hathaway’s Austen. There are some truly good moments between the two of them, but sadly these moments don’t occur often enough.
One of the problems with Becoming Jane is that there is no real clear indication as to what young Miss Austen is, in fact, becoming. Is she becoming the novelist we love? Or is she simply becoming a woman? Perhaps it’s a bit of both, but Jarrold’s film stumbles so much in establishing the purpose that I think the film falters under the weight of its own uncertainty. Scenes without purpose tend to be boring and Becoming Jane has an awful lot of those.
There are also some factual difficulties to contend with, although I doubt many of these will be all that bothersome to the Jane Austen fan. Take for instance the existence of Jane’s relatively quiet writing area. That likely wouldn’t have existed, as Virginia Woolf points out Austen’s nephew as stating that Jane wrote her works in the common sitting room with everyone else simply prancing about around her. No matter, it makes for a lovely picture and this film has quite a few of those. The direction is quite good and the lush green grounds are nice to look at.
But overall, it keeps coming back to the fact that this movie is just a little too tiresome and a little too sluggish. A fan of most period pieces, I was disappointed at how little “oomph” this particular one had and how, despite the chemistry of the lead actors, there was so little to play with. Inventing and building about the framework of speculation should allow for more creativity than what Becoming Jane wound up with, I would think. As such, it’s just a very average period romance. See Atonement instead.
4.5/10
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