“Becoming Jane” is an unbecoming tribute to a legend. It aggrandizes what most scholars say was a minor seasonal flirtation in the little-known life story of Jane Austen and makes it into only a poor woman’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
It is nice to see a summer movie about a subject of substance with pretty period-art direction. But this oversimplified and underwhelming piece twists an obscure early episode between the real Jane (a lackluster Anne Hathaway) and a neighbor’s visiting relative Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) into a record of the alleged seminal moment of emotional and literary awakening for the original chick-lit authoress. As directed by Julian Jarrold, loosely adapted from Jon Spence’s 2003 biography “Becoming Jane Austen,” it embellishes one brief tete-a-tete into a narrative meant to show the personal source of her early 19th-century British novels’ running themes.
Here’s the problem, though, with today’s well-intentioned if plain “Jane.”
It does indeed duplicate her recognizable sources of plot conflict — the clash between class ambition, financial need and romantic love as a young woman heroine too smart for her own good in that era is courted by the misunderstood young man irresistibly drawn to her. Yet in trying to ride the petticoats of Austen’s resurgent modern popularity and looking for another way to exploit that, the very elements of her oeuvre that are so enchanting and enduring get short shrift here in her own biopic.
For example, as in so many of Austen’s tales, this fabricated version of her experiences too has a silly exasperating mother figure, an understanding but weak father figure and a snobby all-powerful dowager figure. But even though they are played by some of the greatest character actors around — Julie Walters, James Cromwell and Maggie Smith, respectively — they aren’t fleshed out with the kind of colorful lines or eccentric specificity that have made Austen’s own fictional creations so memorable to read about or see in the better screen interpretations of her work.
Furthermore, the interwoven subplot intricacies in her books don’t exist in this movie, which focuses boringly, almost exclusively on the main scenario. Worst of all, the dialogue directly refers to but then leaves out the delicate tone of irony that made her social satires sing.
It makes no sense to rip off an icon but then blow the very sensibility that made her brilliant.
‘Becoming Jane’
**
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Maggie Smith, James McAvoy
Director: Julian Jarrold
Rated PG for brief nudity and mild language
Running time: 113 minutes
