Starring: Anne Hathaway, James Cromwell, Julie Walters and Maggie Smith
Director: Julian Jarrold
Rated: PG
JANE Austen continues to be ever popular.
There have been new television versions of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey and the Keira Knightley-Matthew MacFadyen Pride and Prejudice proved a winner with audiences in 2005.
Emma Thompson won an Oscar for her screenplay for the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, the same year as the Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle television version of Pride and Prejudice became one of the most avidly followed series.
Emma was portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow in 1996 and Frances O’Connor starred in Mansfield Park in 2000.
Quite a collection of films and television adaptations.
Now, the question is what about Jane Austen herself?
The answers offered in Becoming Jane are insightful rather than historically accurate.
First, an alert to the title and its play on words.
The film suggests the influences on Miss Austen that led her to becoming the great author admired for the last 200 years.
However, the Regency period in which she came to adulthood and did her novel writing was one of surface wealth, elegance and propriety.
Jane fitted into this world (even as she looked at it and described it with ironic wit) and was a very becoming woman.
Both these aspects are present in this lightly entertaining journey back into British literary history.
However, one needs to do a bit of Googling to check how the screenplay has played with dates.
At the end, an ageing Jane (though she was only 32 at the time of her death) does a public reading of Pride and Prejudice (which had been published only four years earlier; Sense and Sensibility preceded it in fact and both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously).
But this film is something of a fantasy. What if …?
And how could Jane have written so insightfully into the emotional details of the human heart (both male and female) without having some experience of love herself?
Historian Jon Spence acted as adviser to the film.
He gave a kind of blessing to the speculation that the Irish Thomas Lefroy may have served as something of an inspiration to Jane.
The screenplay posits that, after a short period in which she detests his manners, his manner of sleeping during her reading at her sister Cassandra’s engagement party, his derogatory remarks and his somewhat profligate reputation, she falls in love with him. And, eventually, he with her.
But, as we know, it was not to be.
Actually, the screenplay is often quite close to Pride and Prejudice.
Her parents, the Reverend Austen (James Cromwell) and Mrs Austen (Julie Walters) bear a number of similarities to Mr and Mrs Bennet.
Lady Gresham (a pinched-mouth Maggie Smith) is, of course, a Lady Catherine de Burgh type.
The impecunious family, the local balls, the churchgoing are all familiar Austen themes and reflect her life.
The film also suggests that when she writes of Lydia and Mr Wickham eloping, she knew first hand what it was like, though her motives at the end are highly noble.
Anne Hathaway is very pretty as Jane and she is placed in very pretty surroundings.
She makes a fair fist of assertion (though she played more assertive characters in Brokeback Mountain and The Devil Wears Prada).
James McAvoy (Narnia, Starter for Ten) plays a character who is not entirely unlike his character in The Last King of Scotland.
He starts as a would-be man about town indebted to his humourless, rigorous and snobbish judge uncle (Ian Richardson in one of his final roles).
An unwelcome summer exile to Hampshire turns him into a devoted but weak suitor. McAvoy’s is quite a strong performance.
Becoming Jane takes us back two centuries for a pleasantly light and rather slight exploration of Jane Austen.
