The Jane Austen Book Club
Based on Karen Joy Fowler’s book of the same title, the Jane Austen Book Club film adaptation is not geared for anyone who is not familiar with Ms. Austen’s works. I don’t just mean you should have seen the movies or liked the books when you read them 10 years ago. I mean you must be able to follow this made-up JABC-style piece of dialogue: “Marianne shows us that with a Fanny Price in the world, there can be no Sir Elton.” (Reference: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma.) The onscreen members of the titular club all fit neatly into an Austenian character archetype. This is a screenwriter’s conceit (and a novelist’s) but still possible, thanks to the depth of Austen’s writing. Their personal stories away from Book Club dovetail beautifully and concurrently into the plot of the movie as well. This seems designed to emphasize the universality of Austen’s writing (like Clueless or Bridget Jones did). However, the parallels sometimes seem a little forced – Grigg (Hugh Dancy) as Mr. Bingley but also as Mr. Knightley – plots stepping clumsily across books at each other. The contrivances serve a greater purpose, however, which is to serve an immensely, almost decadently satisfying ending, and to recommend the heavenly escapism of the original works all the more.
Modern day women, even having the same quaint personal issues as Austen’s stable of characters, have so many more options than in her day, the stakes are simply not as high. One must surrender and accept the hopeless misery that would be the life of a spunky, sexy single woman who refuses to be tied down to a man (Maria Bello) in order to root for her to compromise her ideals and give us a gooey, candlelit ending. I don’t want to say in what ways the stories work themselves into their endings, but I can’t imagine that you can’t figure it out by watching the movie. It’s delicious to have an irony-free happy ending in the midst of today’s modern cinematic conventions; simultaneously, it is eye-rollingly guilt-inducing. My companions and I enjoyed it very much, despite my lingering feelings of an overly contrived plot existing only to expound upon Austen’s virtue.
It would have been a boring insult to the audience (anyone interested in this movie surely is already an Austen fan) to spell out everything they were talking about in the literature, but it would have been nice to balance it out a little more to entice new readers. If you leave the theatre not mooning over Grigg I will be very surprised. Emily Blunt is tremendous as the troubled reader, her character is the most richly developed of them all. Close behind is Bello’s manfree dog breeder, whose dog funeral serves as the vessel for them all to seek a little more human connection in their lives. Come for the book discussions, but, as my own book group does, stay for the interpersonal magic.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 9/21/07
Time in minutes 106
Director Robin Swicord
Studio Sony Pictures Classics
