Becoming Jane.

"Becoming Jane would have us believe that Austen, played here by the perennially boring Anne Hathaway, was nothing less, or more, than a watered-down variation on one of her own heroines," sighs Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE, "a woman who owed her inspiration as an artist to her doomed love affair with an Irish barrister (a suitably charismatic James McAvoy). This Shakespeare in Love style premise is tired enough on its own without the dubious implication of the romantic fantasies in which it trades. It's all right there in that execrable title: she was always a writer, but she needed to know the love of a man in order to... become Jane."

"Becoming Jane is art house dreck, Victorian porn for American women," growls Marcy Dermansky.

Updated through 8/9.

But Ella Taylor, writing in the Voice, finds it to be "presentable Harlequin romance, with hurdle after hurdle succeeded by an eleventh-hour turnaround. I'm grateful that the real-life Austen was freed to write her own superior romances, but I wept like a baby when love lay bleeding on the ground."

"Not to put too fine a point on it, but this movie throws like a girl," writes Jason Clark at Slant.

"The whole film is respectful to a fault, including appearances by English acting royalty Julie Walters and Maggie Smith - or was it Judi Dench and Helen Mirren?" wonders Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "These actresses have played so many versions of Shakespeare and Austen that they must be as bored with these matriarchal roles as we are; no wonder half of Britain has agreed to two-minute Harry Potter cameos."

"Restoring passion, if not actual sex, to Jane Austen and her heroines defines the current wave of the flourishing Austen industry," writes Caryn James in the New York Times.

Susan King profiles Hathaway for the Los Angeles Times.

And don't forget the new primer: Simon Augustine's "Writers and Poets on Film."

Update: "Better than fine as another exquisitely stiff-lipped, impeccably mannered period charmer, divorce the flinches of conscience caused by Jane Austen getting the Jane Austen treatment from the resultant, respectably appointed film and you are left with a viewing experience that could join the legion of Austen adaptations at a decent ranking," suggests Michelle Orange at the Reeler. "And haters beware: the unmitigated gall of casting cow-eyed Anne Hathaway as one of the greatest writers and sharpest wits who ever lived is not as satisfying a debacle as one might fathom."

Updates, 8/3: "The problem with Becoming Jane is that it snaps all too snugly into a modern template of romance, instead of going to the trouble of imagining - since we've already acknowledged that imagining is what we're doing here -- what romance may have meant to the real Austen," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"To literate Anglophiles, Austen and everything she represents looms as a symbolic bulwark against the values of today's babelicious Babylon. The premarital meat market of her era was reassuringly prim," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. Here, then, the "screenplay's pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film."

"There's nothing really wrong with Hathaway's performance, but the movie tries to cast her as one of Austen's own feisty heroines, and she doesn't quite measure up," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Alicia Silverstone have all evinced more spark and wit than the earnest, straightforward Hathaway."

"I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than Shakespeare in Love or, to go back even further in time in the genre of writers' biographies, Greg Peck as Feodor Dostoevski in 1949's The Great Sinner," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "As for the rest of us, the question is simpler - is it worth the eight bucks? I would vote yes, primarily on the basis of performance."

"Austen has become, in recent years, a kind of movie franchise, in some ways not unlike Harry Potter - except, of course, for a much more limited and self-consciously literary audience," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "With the exception of the rambunctious and highly cinematic Emma Thompson-Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility of a dozen years ago, these adaptations always strike me as rather wan and patronizing - and this movie is no exception to that rule."

"Becoming Jane works strenuously to turn Austen's story into, well, a second-rate Jane Austen novel," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "[I]t's the happiest possible interpretation of a life that many biographers would consider suffused with sadness. Neat trick, that."

"[S]ome special insight into - or extra feeling for - Austen's work might have helped," suggests the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "At least it might have compensated for the two weaknesses found here that are not present in Austen adaptations: clumsy plotting and a less-than-satisfying ending."

"Why this fixation on imagining Austen as the heroine of one of her own stories?" asks lit prof and editor Deidre Lynch at Slate. "Austen wrote on many subjects: women's lack of freedom, the injuries wrought by the 19th-century class system, literature's falsification of life, the importance of manners, the virtues of independent thought. But, by and large, it is Austen the expert on courtship rites who dominates contemporary popular culture. It is this Austen who is emulated by authors of middlebrow women's fiction, from Helen Fielding (who wrote Bridget Jones's Diary) on." And get this: "A few of the students who enroll in my Austen courses admit that they are there to trawl the books for dating tips."

"Directed by Julian Jarrold - whose last film, Kinky Boots, was a different take on the battle between the desires of the heart and the constraints of Englishness - Becoming Jane is a warm and charming romantic drama," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And, considering that the average moviegoer knows of Austen's work far better than they know of her life - and, if they know her work at all, they know it through filmed adaptations of the novels as opposed to the novels themselves - the odds are far better that audiences will be charmed, as opposed to offended, by its inventions."

"What would a Jane Austen story be, after all, without its witty heroines, flawed but lovable gentlemen and picturesque manors?" asks Meg Reber at the Reeler. "But something isn't right. Or rather, it's that things are too right, and that is where it goes from bad to worse."

"It was a cliché 10 years ago to say that the Austen phenomenon was big. It has now burst completely out of its bodice," writes Time's Lev Grossman. "We can't seem to put down Austen, or leave her alone, or get to the end of her. She has become a commodity for which there is an infinite demand.... It may have been brutal and unfair, but it is an essential aspect of Austen's authorial personality that she did not rail against the system she wrote about, or try to change it.... There is a suggestion of Orwellian despair in Austen: as in 1984, her characters cannot hope to break the iron cage around them, can only clear a little space inside it where they can be themselves. Austen's upper lip is defiantly stiff.... Austen played the game, in other words, and she knew it was a game. But that doesn't mean she denied herself pleasure in the skill with which she played. This may, paradoxically, represent a hidden source of her current appeal: in our present period of romantic anarchy, when men and women are socially and financially equal, and love is supposed to be about hooking up and breaking the rules, Austen made the delicate art of obeying rules - even cruel, arbitrary rules - sexy."

Updates, 8/6: "It is directed at moviegoers who, having feasted on large-screen adaptations of her major novels, will not be fobbed off with pedantic protestations that there are no more to adapt," notes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Once you admit that the Jane Austen depicted onscreen bears scant relation to any person named Jane Austen, living or dead, the film fulfills its purpose."

Lisa Rosen reports in the LAT that, for the Jane Austen Society, the film is basically just fine.

Updates, 8/9: Laura Boyes in the Independent Weekly: "A visit to Mrs Radcliffe, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho, results in one authoress's advice to another: Use your imagination. Would that writers Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams and director Julian Jarrold had used theirs either a little more - or a little less."

"Becoming Jane is rarely Becoming Austen," writes Brian Gibson in the Vue Weekly.

Posted by dwhudson at August 2, 2007 9:59 AM