Film review addressed to Jane Austen
Joe W. Smith III of the Williamsport, PA Sun-Gazette wrote a review of the film MUST LOVE DOGS as an open letter to Jane Austen.
Miss Austen, I often wish you’d lived long enough to write more novels; but perhaps it’s fitting that your immortality is merely figurative. Like your storyline, you’d have trouble adjusting to the 21st century.
We sincerely doubt that.
August 5th, 2005 at 11:28 am
I’m a Canadian, and up in “Canuckistan”, the term “liberal” comprehends quite a different set of qualities from the term bandied about by so many disgruntled right-of-centre American media critics. So I really get a kick out of the following:
“Plus, there’s a gay couple; and no, Miss Austen, this doesn’t mean “happy” — though the script betrays its liberal agenda by making them the best-adjusted twosome in the tale.”
Ah ha! The Liberal Conspiracy has infiltrated Hollywood! Just when we thought we had figured out that movie producers were out to make money, we discover that in fact, they’re aiming at indoctrinating an unsuspecting public with the ever-offensive principles of freedom of speech, social acceptance, and the right to disagree.
August 5th, 2005 at 11:41 am
Yeah, I was trying to figure out if that was supposed to be ironic. I suspect not. But the whole thing about Jane being some kind of wilting flower who couldn’t take modern vulgarity made me itch. She made hiney jokes, for pete’s sake.
August 5th, 2005 at 12:23 pm
I resent the fact that Austen is automatically assumed to be a Regency version of today’s right-wing social conservative, simply because she beloged to a by-gone era. As if her intelligence, wit, and support of all that is honest and noble in human interaction would balk at divorce, sex and homosexuality, just because they weren’t as widely accepted or discussed in her time. Once again, Austen is invoked by someone who does not seem to be familiar with her work…
August 5th, 2005 at 4:18 pm
Perhaps I reveal my sometimes right-of-center social mores by saying that for the most part, this reviewer seems to me to be paying Jane Austen a compliment. I saw this movie and I thought that it was entertaining enough, but some of the teenage angst and sexual desperation just didn’t seem that clever or necessary in conveying the storyline of two people who are attracted to eachother, eager for companionship, but just not sure what the other is about–my time still might have been better spent rereading P&P.
August 5th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
But Jane Austen read and enjoyed all kinds of novels, even Gothic novels and novels of sensibility that, in her time, were the equivalent of chick flicks and much decried by the media, in exactly the same sniffy way that the author of the piece did. She was not an intellectual snob by any means. However, that doesn’t mean she couldn’t be a critical reader (NA has some humorous criticism of Ann Radcliffe’s writing style) or that she would have written her own books that way.
I maintain that Jane certainly could have adjusted to the 21st century. She was no wilting flower of delicate spinsterhood.
August 5th, 2005 at 9:55 pm
It depends on your definition of “adjusting to the 21st century.”
If you mean, able to find a readership and survive as an author, that’s one thing.
If you mean, give up her religion or spiritual mores and entirely accept things which run contrary to same, that’s another.
August 5th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
applying current definitions of “left” and “right” political ideologies seems somewhat illogical. JA was a product of her times, and to apply what has currently come to be defined as conservative/liberal in OUR times…isn’t that inherently flawed? the times, politics, social norms, etc. were completely different in most respects. not that i can’t appreciate the purpose of this debate for intellectually stimulating reasons
i enjoy my fair share of that as well! i guess i think what is most incredible about JA is her ability to appeal to anyone, whether you lie left, right, or completely on a different wavelength…but maybe its just the peacemaker in me coming out 
August 6th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
I thought it a nice construct for a movie review, main point being that whilst Jane’s novels had obstacles and challenges which this reader, anyway, found quite credible on the path to romance, the movie being reviewed was lacking. Our writer was probably interested in enlightening readers about great literature and great plot development of another age. Am glad he did.
August 6th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
It depends on your definition of “adjusting to the 21st century.”
If you mean, able to find a readership and survive as an author, that’s one thing.
If you mean, give up her religion or spiritual mores and entirely accept things which run contrary to same, that’s another.
I’m unclear why it has to be one or the other. I distrust extremes of thought when it comes to Jane Austen and her work, because she did not indulge in them herself. Her “good” characters had flaws; her “evil” characters were not evil in the way Ann Radcliffe’s villains were evil. They were almost casually mean to other people, self-centered and thoughtless, unpleasant individuals, but never murderers or kidnappers, for instance. Their crimes were of the small everyday variety, being more commonly found in life, at least in the midlands of England (as Catherine Morland discovered).
I don’t think either extreme of modern (American) political thought can or should claim Jane Austen for their own. She and her work were more infinitely complex than simple liberalism or conservativism. I think that’s why I liked the first line of The Jane Austen Book Club so much: each of us has a private Jane Austen. That’s so true!
Perhaps a 21st Century Jane would have a blog where she commented snarkily on the aspects of modern society that she found disagreeable.
I still don’t think she would have had trouble living in this century.
August 7th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
hear hear, well said!