Aug 27 2007
a pastiche of Jane Austins life and works
The film ‘Becoming Jane’ pulls together themes from Jane Austens novels and rewrites them as-if they were experiences happening directly to Jane and her family.
A generous perspective might describe this as a creative pastiche highlighting Janes classic storylines littered with powerful quotes that interweaves elements of her own life story.
A less generous interpretation might be that the film cobbles together crowd-pleasing dialog into a script that lacks the powerful character insight, detail, and well paced plot developments of Janes own writing.
irritants:
- Jane as vibrant and very physically pretty girl by current beauty standards. Janes modern style of self expression does not convincingly fit with the proprieties of the time captured so beautifully in her own writing.
- The film’s premis that Jane wrote only about that which she experienced first-hand. The implication is that she did not have the imaginitation or capability to construct storylines beyond her immediate experience.
- Jane as wooed by virtually every batchelor with whom she converses. Virtually no situational relationship development demonstrated over time all relationships are portrayed in brief encounters with implied chemistry (or lack of it) with the slight exception of the main love interest. Slight. We are required to believe that deep love evolves across a couple of encounters and conversations.
fun bits:
- spotting quotes from Jane’s books.
- working-out which characters and actions were inspired by which book characters.
- aesthetics of the sets, costumes and characters.
- some novel unexpected character developments.
a pastiche of Jane Austins life and works
