Unbecoming Jane

Despite the ridiculously cold weather (which had earlier turned my attempt at an army-style sprint into a minor respiratory condition), the mad Irishwoman and I ventured out to see ‘Becoming Jane’, a new and thoroughly fictitious account of Jane Austen’s early romantic dalliances. This was at the Irishwoman’s behest; I was prepared to put aside my doubts and embrace it, she to put aside her hopes and detest it. As it turned out, my preparation was in vain – hers was not. ‘Becoming Jane’ was a dreary, cringemaking, earnest pastiche of frilly costume drama.

Perhaps if you’d shied away from costume drama in the past, you might find this charming. If you have, like most of its target audience, grown up on a diet of Mr Darcy wading out of sunspeckled lakes or Lucy Honeychurch’s mild feistiness dissolving into gooey romance, the charm feels a little resucitated. Jane and her sweetheart engage in some weak verbal sparring whilst mincing through a country dance at a society gathering; the romance begins with an awkward, unexpected encounter in the delightful English countryside; a wicked old matriarch seeks to thwart our heroine’s one chance at true happiness; the vicar is a bumbling eejit.

If you just looked at the cast list, you’d be filled with a vain hope. Admittedly, I had a continuous urge to smack Anne Hathaway’s trembling jaw, but most people find her beguiling. As the rakish Lefroy, James McAvoy, who shone in ‘The Last King of Scotland’, exudes charisma and energy, but a flat, witless script denies him (or anyone else) any good lines. A tripod of costume-friendly luvvies – Maggie Smith, James Cromwell and Julie Walters – try to prop it all up by doing their usual admirable turns. Not even the direction inspires. Like McAvoy, the unknown Julian Jarrold has an impressive TV resume, but unlike McAvoy, he fails to transfer his magic touch to celluloid. If you have a weak script, at least make your film pretty. Merely inserting Miss Hathaway isn’t going to do that.

Clearly, then, I was finding it all rather laughable by the time we’d approached the finale, in which an elderly Lefroy introduces his eldest daughter to the spinster Austen as “Jane” (isn’t that slightly creepy?). Worse, the film makers decided to inform us all that “In her short life, Jane Austen produced five of the greatest novels in the English language”. If I wasn’t so fond of the word ‘quibble’, I would be employing something far stronger and frankly obscene with which to refute this claim. Especially if one of those is supposed to be ‘Northanger Abbey’. McAvoy is not to be missed, nor is the idea of a semi-fictional history a bad premise for a film. For proof of these two claims, invest your time and money in 'The Last King of Scotland', not 'Becoming Jane'.