The Jane Austen Book Club Review
by Jonathan Moya (jjmoya1955 AT yahoo DOT com)October 10th, 2007
THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB (2007)
A Movie Review by Jonathan Moya
Rating: B+ or 3.5 out of 5
The Review:
Even though I've read three Jane Austen novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey), I am not much of a Janeite. I prefer my literature greasy, rough, loose, mythic, and rupturing with language. I am a 20th Century guy. Give me a choice between reading a Thomas Pynchon or Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel and a Jane Austen or Henry James opus brimming with precision and gentility and I will go with the mods.
But when I reread Austen I notice how cheeky, and down right subversive she really is-- and suddenly realize that without dear lady Jane there would be no The Lady Eve-- or any romantic comedies. The woman is a Goddess, and every day in the dark places where people meet, dozens of iterations of Austenian love light the world.
The Jane Austen Book Club is happy to share the illumination of Jane's grace. The five women and one man delight in the therapy of insight a good Austen novel provides. The filler, transitional scenes are stuffed with showing the six in the enlightening blanket comfort of a good read.
Six gospels are what the divine Jane left the world. So lo and behold in addition to the six characters, The Jane Austen Book Club is broken into six chapters named for each of her novels, has six subplots, and lasts exactly six months. And like in Austen there is a lot of wishing for, but no actual sex. (Now, I know why I never finished rereading those novels.)
Modern day Sacramento, a city at the edge of nature, is a good substitute for Austen's Regency England.
The elder statesman of The Jane Austen Book Club is the fiftyish, six times married Bernadette (Kathy Baker), a free spirit who has read enough Austen to make her the emotional magnet the other four good girls who read Jane are pulled to when love and men turn polar opposites. Bernadette knows that love is a boomerang-- it leaves and always comes back. She knows, it is best to sensibly catch love with both hands, rather than let it insensibly hit you on the back of the head in rebound.
Bernadette starts the book club as a distraction for Jocelyn (Maria Bello playing the Emma character), a proud, forty-something, spinsterish beauty, who recently lost the great love of her life-- Pridey, her prize winning Rhodesian Ridgeback. Jocelyn finds dogs easier to handle and easier to love than men, so she raises them professionally. With her Pridey gone, Bernadette senses that Jocelyn might be reading for some human affection.
Jocelyn's best friend is Sylvia (Amy Brenneman). In high school Jocelyn and Sylvia loved, and at one time dated the same boy, Daniel (Jimmy Smits emitting smarminess even when it seems he is acting utterly sincere). Sylvia ended up marrying him. Happily married for twenty years, Sylvia is soon to be an unhappy divorcee. It seems that Daniel has been writing his own story with another woman in his law office.
Sylvia's daughter is Allegra, an out of the closet lesbian who has the skeleton in the closet love of extreme sports like skydiving and rock climbing as the one thing this mother-daughter never share. Allegra is an easy going girl on the outside, but moody and insecure to nail down as the wind inside. When a relationship blows hot she stays. When it blows cold she goes. Right now she's a goner, and living with her mom, ostensibly to cheer up Sylvia, but deep inside Allegra can't stand the loneliness.
Grigg (Hugh Dancy), is an eligible and well-off techie (cue a big Austen theme) and Sci-Fi geek who lives in a big tract house filled with props from Star Wars, Star Trek and 50's outer space movies. He is cute as a button and ready for love for that woman who can look past the endearing ways he can awkwardly shoot himself in the foot.
Jocelyn and Grigg meet cute while she is attending a breeding convention and he is tending to matters other worldly with his fellow S/F geek's. She thinks he is an adorable little puppy who would make a good comforting lap dog for the depressed Sylvia. Grigg, a non-Janeite would rather make Jocelyn his bitch. I smell more Jane in the air.
The last member of the book club is the aptly named Prudie (Emily Blunt), who is in love with a husband too busy at work to give her the time of day. Dean (Marc Blucas) thinks Austen is the capitol of Texas.
Prudie is a high school French teacher who has never been to France. Their long overdue French idyll is constantly pushed back. This time Dean's boss has asked him to take an important client to a Lakers games. Prudie defeated, discouraged, and ready to look for love in all the wrong places is tempted to have an affair with one of her students.
Unlike the charmless Becoming Jane, The Jane Austen Book Club is actually a good read. It is tightly scripted, but loosely acted by the five female and one male leads. It has an uncorseted feeling. Maria Bello, Emily Blunt and Hugh Dancy are particularly good. They all give their characters an ironic intelligence. They would be at home in any Austen novel.
Even though the Austen critiques never rise above mildly insightful, they do give the uninitiated a good road map in which to start to explore the novels.
For the Janeites this film is a delight. It verifies their beliefs that Austen is life itself, a good hot toddy to take when romance gets rough.
Looking for Janeisms and Austen parallels is actually fun here. Just remember, "Jane Austen is a freakin mine field", as Jocelyn says.
Robin Swicord a screenwriter (Memoirs of a Geisha, Matilda, Practical Magic) and novice director knows that the greatness of Austen comes from the sum total of all of her parts. Too look too much for the prideful character is to miss the prejudice one. Searching for sense will only leave sensibility bereft.
Austen and Swicord know that the marriage of the big picture is what counts. So the characters neatly counterbalance each other-- and the subplots have their counterplots. If anything The Jane Austen Book Club runs too precisely-- almost like an atomic clock.
The film is joyous, but not as ironically joyous as Austen can be. There is only one truly shining Austen moment.
Grigg comes to his first book club meeting with a green leather bound copy of her collected works. The other five have their own well-thumbed through personal editions. They all laugh when Grigg holds up his tome and points to the titles etched in gold on the binder. "Is this the order that we read them in," he says. "They are not sequels," Jocelyn replies bemused. His first meeting and he already knows more than them.
A lot more moments like that and The Jane Austen Book Club could easily be Jane's seventh novel.
For now, it is a well-read an delightful B+.
The Credits:
Written and directed by Robin Swicord; based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler; director of photography, John Toon; edited by Maryann Brandon; music by Aaron Zigman; production designer, Rusty Smith; produced by John Calley, Julie Lynn and Diana Napper; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 105 minutes.
WITH: Kathy Baker (Bernadette), Maria Bello (Jocelyn), Emily Blunt (Prudie), Amy Brenneman (Sylvia), Hugh Dancy (Grigg), Maggie Grace (Allegra), Lynn Redgrave (Mama Sky), Jimmy Smits (Daniel), Marc Blucas (Dean), Kevin Zegers (Trey), Parisa Fitz-Henley (Corinne), Gwendolyn Yeo (Dr. Samantha Yep) and Nancy Travis (Cat).
"The Jane Austen Book Club" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It contains some strong language and sexual situations.
Copyright 2007 Jonathan Moya
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