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September 21, 2007
Bibliophiles With Pride and Prejudice, Some in Need of Gentle Persuasion
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 21, 2007
“The Jane Austen Book Club” is such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.
After all, aren’t novels that fall under that noxiously condescending rubric contrived to reassure readers by offering them secondhand problem-solving advice? Like it or not, Jane Austen is a rock on which the genre was founded. So why shouldn’t a novel and the movie adapted from it acknowledge the connection in a way that is smart and amusing as well as comforting?
A tightly knit ensemble piece directed and written by Robin Swicord, the film adroitly shuffles nine characters (five women and four men) and throws in a too-brief cameo by Lynn Redgrave as one woman’s dissipated, post-hippie mother.
You can question the story’s conceit that the novels of Austen are an ideal guidebook to personal fulfillment for the modern American woman. But as the members of a Jane Austen reading group, who live in Sacramento, analyze the behavior of the characters in her novels, the movie is also a savvy course on how to read a novel of manners. If that novel has any depth, the characters’ motives are open to interpretation. Is a knight in shining armor really Mr. Right? Does a happy ending really augur happily ever after? What are so-and-so’s real motivations?
For these likable women and the one man who joins their group, which meets monthly to discuss a different Austen novel at each session, Austen’s books serve as mirrors and Rorschach tests in which the members recognize themselves and their romantic peccadilloes. The discussions in these group-therapy sessions lead them toward solutions to their problems. The screenplay includes just enough references to characters and plot developments in Austen novels to whet your appetite for reading or rereading them, but not so many that it alienates the uninitiated.
The movie gets foolishly carried away only once, when it suggests that a clueless macho boor, pressured to read Austen by his neglected wife, is magically transformed into a cuddly enlightened tomcat purring with empathy. I didn’t believe it for a minute. But I like the idea of a great British author from another century casting such a spell. If Shakespeare can do it, why not Austen? More
Bibliophiles With Pride and Prejudice, Some in Need of Gentle Persuasion
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 21, 2007
“The Jane Austen Book Club” is such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.
After all, aren’t novels that fall under that noxiously condescending rubric contrived to reassure readers by offering them secondhand problem-solving advice? Like it or not, Jane Austen is a rock on which the genre was founded. So why shouldn’t a novel and the movie adapted from it acknowledge the connection in a way that is smart and amusing as well as comforting?
A tightly knit ensemble piece directed and written by Robin Swicord, the film adroitly shuffles nine characters (five women and four men) and throws in a too-brief cameo by Lynn Redgrave as one woman’s dissipated, post-hippie mother.
You can question the story’s conceit that the novels of Austen are an ideal guidebook to personal fulfillment for the modern American woman. But as the members of a Jane Austen reading group, who live in Sacramento, analyze the behavior of the characters in her novels, the movie is also a savvy course on how to read a novel of manners. If that novel has any depth, the characters’ motives are open to interpretation. Is a knight in shining armor really Mr. Right? Does a happy ending really augur happily ever after? What are so-and-so’s real motivations?
For these likable women and the one man who joins their group, which meets monthly to discuss a different Austen novel at each session, Austen’s books serve as mirrors and Rorschach tests in which the members recognize themselves and their romantic peccadilloes. The discussions in these group-therapy sessions lead them toward solutions to their problems. The screenplay includes just enough references to characters and plot developments in Austen novels to whet your appetite for reading or rereading them, but not so many that it alienates the uninitiated.
The movie gets foolishly carried away only once, when it suggests that a clueless macho boor, pressured to read Austen by his neglected wife, is magically transformed into a cuddly enlightened tomcat purring with empathy. I didn’t believe it for a minute. But I like the idea of a great British author from another century casting such a spell. If Shakespeare can do it, why not Austen? More
