AustenBlog . . . she’s everywhere » Becoming Jane News Roundup: We Swear We’re Working on Our Review Edition

3 August 2007

Becoming Jane News Roundup: We Swear We’re Working on Our Review Edition

Filed under: Becoming Jane — Mags @ 1:29 am

With luck, it will be posted tomorrow. We hoped for tonight but were distracted whilst looking up “one thing” in Family Record. Famous last words. On to the news!

Alert Janeite Rebecca sent us an article from the CBC about Becoming Jane as well as other Austen film adaptations, which we mostly rather enjoyed (she mentions the Barbie P&P!) though with a couple of quibbles.

As soon as the casting of The Devil Wears Prada star Anne Hathaway was announced, Janeites were protesting that she was too pretty.

Honestly, most of us were complaining more about the Made Up Story than about Miss H.’s relative prettiness. Why wouldn’t we want Jane to be pretty?

Of Persuasion 95:

Many Janeites commend the two leads — Amanda Root, a relative unknown, and Irish character actor Ciarán Hinds — for being kind of homely.

HOMELY? Argh.

Entertainment Weekly has a review of the film, as does the Chicago Tribune.

But the idea that every work of art has direct, identifiable roots in reality is too simplistic. And in film and fiction alike, it leads to a scavenger-hunt approach to biography, as complicated lives are reduced to a sequence of possible clues.

But the biggest problem with this approach may be the way it turns biopics into second-hand versions of the artists’ work. That’s the major issue with “Becoming Jane,” a film that reinvents British writer Jane Austen into a character in a broad Austen pastiche.

[. . .]

But it’s hard for the film to escape the shadow of Austen’s superior talent when it filches so much from her books. And by implying that every aspect of her work came directly from life, it sells her creativity short. The filmmakers clearly respect Austen. So why present her as a mere stenographer, dutifully taking dictation from the world around her?

Well said.