Jane Austen, Wild Romantic
At last, some news about BECOMING JANE!
Anne Hathaway, who will star as Jane Austen (so we might as well get used to the idea), told Empire a little about the film.
The film, written by TV scribe Kevin Hood (Man and Boy, Medics) is not a traditional biopic, instead taking a portion of Austen’s life that reflects the wild romanticism of her beloved novels.
Dude. Wild romanticism? Jane Austen? The heck?
“It’s the time at which she’s been writing for a bit and has just started work on Pride and Prejudice,” Hathaway continues. “Largely it’s based on a biography by Claire Tomlin (sic) which suggests that Jane had a love affair with an Irishman that nobody knew about. The movie is about how that love affair affected her as a writer and a woman. The choices she had to make about it are heartbreaking. It’s actually a very dramatic story that winds up resembling a lot of her novels. You see shades of all of her major works in it.”
Nobody knew about Tom Lefroy? After she was profligate about sitting out dances with him? Everybody knew about it. And it’s been in every biography, just about. However, this bit sounds promising:
“Jane Austen is one of the most special literary figures. I don’t want to short change her in any way.”
Good to know. We’ll be holding you to that, by the way. 
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:07 pm
Uhg! This sounds awful!
“Jane Austen is one of the most special literary figures. I don’t want to short change her in any way.” Good to know. We’ll be holding you to that, by the way.”
We all will!! I can’t even imagine what that’s going to be like! I thought MP2 was bad!
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:13 pm
awfull indeed…
well, i sorta hope this one is going to be SO crappy that we’ll get saved from seeing it in cinemas everywhere - maybe a tiny little dvd with no promotion will do as well?!
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:16 pm
You’ll notice the article says they are “trying to get financing.” So it might not get made at all.
Despite my snark, I don’t know if it will be awful, but this article sure was.
November 3rd, 2005 at 5:57 pm
Roezema’s Mansfield Park was not awful at all. She provided her own, fanciful interpretation of the novel.
November 3rd, 2005 at 6:05 pm
Actually, it wasn’t her own interpretation, it was Edward Said’s, I believe, or at least based upon his writings.
However one might feel about Said’s commentary vis-a-vis Jane Austen and colonialism, Rozema’s hit-em-with-the-chair style of filmmaking did not mesh well with Jane Austen’s very subtle writing style.
Oh, and her interpretation was full of crap. Otherwise, why would she have had to totally change the personalities of practically every major character to get her point across?
And while I’m on a roll, it would have been easier to accept it as an alternative interpretation if Miramax and its media lackeys *coughRogerEbertcough* had not continuously shoved it down our throats that we stupid provincial Janeites couldn’t figure out what Jane REALLY meant so we should shut up. Just saying.
(And why do I argue with people who don’t have the stones to sign their name?)
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Too true for contradiction, Mags!!!
May I add that we would not have jumped at their throats if they (Miramax, the Weinsteins, Rozema, and co.) had not tried to sell it as “Jane Austen’” MP, as if it were a faithful one adaptation, which it is not.
As for Becoming Jane, I still remember that one member of the Janeites list has read the script and she liked it. So I’m hopeful that it could be interesting, and we are very well warned it might not be a faithfull bio-pic, but an interpretation. So I also hope they find financing. *crossing fingers*
November 4th, 2005 at 4:13 am
Why do you argue with people who don’t have the stones to sign their name? Look at the lengthy amount of crap that you wrote in response to a harmless comment. Who becomes so upset about a comment? Are you so patronizing that people cannot even share their opinions? Grow up and try to be open minded.
November 4th, 2005 at 4:15 am
Correcting people on every, minute thing is really rude and annoying.
November 4th, 2005 at 4:35 am
I think what bothered me about the Rozema MP was the fact that she intentionally conflated Fanny’s character with the young Jane. What I took from that decision (and this is something that occurred to me only years after watching and liking the film) was that, according to Rozema, this was the life Austen deserved - she should have lived as a character in one of her books, and had the romantic comedy ending.
Which, quite frankly, seems to be exactly what BJ is all about.
November 4th, 2005 at 9:46 am
Cinthia, I remember reading that, too, so I’m actually hopeful about the film; I just like snarking the media. I still find Anne Hathaway an odd choice to play Jane, though I don’t dislike her as an actress. I hope they get financing, too.
Abigail, I think it’s interesting that Rozema had to change the personalities of so many characters (most notably, Fanny, Sir Thomas, and Tom Bertram) and totally leave out poor William Price (upon whom I developed a bit of a crush after my last reading of MP) to make her point. It then becomes no longer Jane Austen’s story, which is my problem with it, and I think a lot of people. But as I said, it would have been easier to accept if the studio hadn’t been so eager to shove it down our throats that they were right and those of us being critical were wrong.
Anonymous Coward, it’s called debate. Point and counterpoint. You made your point, I countered, and rather than counter my argument, you insult me. If I didn’t want you to express your opinion, I would have deleted your comment, rather than respond.
November 4th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
Well gosh.
Ms or Mr Anon., as a fellow reader of Jane Austen, one supposes that you might recognize and appreciate that social decorum and polite behavior, even in the face of opinions one might not agree with, which is so clearly supported by Austen in her writing.
We’re all friends of Jane here…let’s play nice
November 4th, 2005 at 4:35 pm
I don’t mind the MP adaptation as much as many Austen fans, mostly because I can’t see it as anything other than an adaptation. The same way the movie Titanic was “based on a true story”. As for “having stones”, who needs to have a name to have an opinion?
November 4th, 2005 at 5:08 pm
You don’t “need” to have a name, but it is rather gutless to disagree with someone without signing some kind of name, even a made-up net handle of some kind, don’t you think?
Also, I begin to suspect the first anonymous poster and the second, more strident poster are two different people. Just a hunch.
November 6th, 2005 at 8:25 am
As Mags well knows, I was personally offended at the omission of William Price from “Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park.” She spent so much time bashing the men in Jane’s story that there was no room for a good, decent man because the presence of such a man would have been antithetical to her premise: Men=bad; quiet, reserved women=bad; feisty women=good.
Edmund was allowed to remain virtually unchanged because he’s a prat and thus helps to prove her anti-male thesis.
November 7th, 2005 at 9:46 am
Oh, I feel bad for Edmund; he gets such a bad rap. I think his main flaw (we’re talking book here, not movie) is immaturity. I think MP is a coming-of-age story as much for him as it is for Fanny.
November 7th, 2005 at 9:49 am
(oops… forgot this…)
Aren’t Anonymous Bloggers just a cold hard fact of the blogosphere? It’s almost like the perfect democracy; doesn’t matter who you are or what your name is - you get to throw your two cents in.
November 7th, 2005 at 10:03 am
Yep, anonymous comments are a fact of life in the blogosphere, and fortunately we don’t get enough of them that I can’t have a little fun with them before I smack them down.
November 8th, 2005 at 8:57 am
Not a promising beginning Ms Hathaway. Not only does everyone in Austendom already know about Tom Lefroy, Becoming Jane Austen is based on Jon Spence’s biography, NOT Claire Tomalin’s. In his book, Spence focuses on proving (or trying to prove) how Austen’s characters and the situations in/plots of her novels ‘evolved’ from events in her family history and the people in her life – especially Eliza de Feuillide and Tom Lefroy. The movie is apparently going to primarily hone in on the latter in order to provide the ‘wild romanticism’ that moviemakers obviously think is necessary to make Austen palatable today.
November 9th, 2005 at 11:01 am
You ladies better not go and see the latest ‘adaptation’. I can imagine you all calling for the smelling salts!
November 11th, 2005 at 4:32 am
Oh, I’ve seen it. Twice as a matter of fact, and was well enough entertained. But it was ‘Formula 1 Austen’ – racing through the plot, and changing some crucial things. That Wickham didn’t try to seduce Miss Darcy into an illicit elopement, but just stopped paying court to her when he found out he wouldn’t get any of her money. I don’t know why they watered that down – it made him less of a villain.
And there were so many stitches they dropped and things I just found downright silly. What was it with all this staring into mirrors and Mr Darcy suddenly turning up half dressed in the middle of the night like a hallucination (which apparently turned out to be ‘real’?) to drop off the mail. What happened to Mr and Mrs Gardiner at Pemberley? Apparently they just steamed on ahead with the tour, took off when they were finished, leaving Elizabeth to walk all the way back to Lambton. How could Darcy pop over to the inn and find aunt and uncle to invite them to dinner – he didn’t know what they looked like, or even what their name was!
By the time Lady Catherine turned up and turned all the Bennets out of bed at 1am to talk to Elizabeth, I’d given up and just kept giggling, and kept it up right through Elizabeth wandering barefoot around the fields in her nightgown and a coat to intercept Darcy, obviously walking the three miles over from Netherfield with his shirt blouse unbuttoned to come calling at dawn.
I was pleased at the chemistry between Knightly and McFadyen, and there were moments that did move me – Charlotte’s monologue to Lizze about why she was marrying Mr Collins was wonderful. I liked the way they ‘toned down’ Mrs Bennett – you could truly understand her desperation to get her girls married and Donald Sutherland at the end also moved me very much indeed. I enjoyed it enough to go see it again – but somehow I just could not take it seriously.
January 28th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Hi, I’m new. Re: the P&P3 critique above…I agree with some points, especially about the chemistry between Darcy and Elizabeth, and liking how Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are portrayed. However, I disagree with a few points and would like to respond. I actually liked the scene in which Elizabeth stares into the mirror as day becomes night. I think it is similar to the swing scene in showing not only the passage of time, but also an interior change that takes place within her, in her understanding of things. It follows her conversation with Darcy during the first proposal scene, which already opened her eyes to seeing him and the situation in a different way. Then his letter gives her additional information that she may not otherwise have accepted as truth. In the book, she reads the letter twice, and her reaction upon the 2nd reading is much different from the 1st reading, but it would have been a terribly boring scene in the movie to show her reading the same letter twice, so I agree with changing it for the movie format. Ditto for changing the painting to a sculpture, and the chance meeting being just the 2 of them at Pemberley, I think it was much more effective for the movie to show how awkward it was for them both initially. Having Elizabeth find out from the Gardiners that Mr. Darcy had invited them to dine also was more effective, you could see her reaction in her face, which she could not have shown if she was face-to-face with Mr. Darcy in that moment. I also think Lady Catherine’s arrival at Longbourne was shown at nighttime just to clearly show that she arrived at an inappropriate hour. In the book she arrives in the morning “too early for callers”(or something to that effect), but how do you show in a movie what hour in the daytime is too early to call? I myself wouldn’t know what proper visiting hours would have been 200 years ago…in a movie they have to be fairly clear about the inappropriateness of it, without having to say that directly in the dialogue. As for the dawn scene, I agree that Jane Austen would not have written it that way, especially not with each of them in such a state of deshabille, but once again I agree that those changes make for a much more dramatic (and romantic) coming-together scene for a movie. The meeting itself was accidental, they both couldn’t sleep and were walking in the moors at dawn, hence the attire. I’ve re-read that scene in the book, it is of course much more proper in terms of setting, hour and dress, but it also doesn’t really provide much in way of dialogue once they confess their love for each other, so I’m happy that the movie fills in the blanks for us. Lastly, I love the ending with the kiss, I could hear other women sighing in the movie theater at the end. Once again, I agree that Austen did not and would not have ended the novel with that scene specifically, but Darcy and Lizzy were already married at the end of the book, so they certainly did kiss in the night at Pemberley. The movie is just showing what the book leaves to our imagination. In the end, if we were content to just imagine it all on our own, then why even go see a movie version at all? We all might as well stay at home, re-read the book and imagine it all as we each would have it be in our ideal version in our own minds. All in all, I love Jane Austen’s writing for all that it is, but clearly she was writing for a reader’s enjoyment, not for future adaptability to an as-is, word-for-word screenplay for the big screen. As such, I think the book should be enjoyed as a book (for the beauty of its writing and all the joy that a good book brings). The movie should be enjoyed as an adaptation, not a verbatim transcription of every scene and every word in the novel. Well, that’s my 2 cents,I know it’s a long commentary, it’s just so nice to have a forum to share thoughts, read comments, and analyze every little detail with others who also love Jane Austen and P&P =) I value all your opinions, even the ones I disagree with
February 21st, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Well, I just saw Brokeback Mountain in which Anne Hathaway plays a small, supporting role and I might be changing my mind about her playing Austen. She may perhaps, just maybe be able to pull it off.
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:41 pm
[...] Well, that’s interesting. Didn’t Anne Hathaway say that it was based on Claire Tomalin’s biography? Austen’s love affair with the then-penniless Irish barrister was doomed because he was not financially solvent and her family would not have consented to the union. [...]