Becoming Jane

I thought it was a great story and very well cast. I didn't enter the theatre with expectations of learning the truth about Jane Austen's world, who was in it and what made her tick. I understood the movie was loosely based on the life of Jane Austen. The writers have simply devised a beautiful and clever story from only a small shred of evidence that there was a true love in her life. From what I gather the movie was really meant to be an fictional intervention in her life devised from what was known of her. I thought Becoming Jane was funny, beautifully shot and it made me giddy with lust over McEvoy. I loved the sexual energy and meeting of the minds between the love interests. I saw quite a few parallels between this story and Jane's novels. I really believe that Jane would absolutely adore this version, if not find it amusing how it was crafted. I do agree that to create a story about a much loved female author is risky territory, as there are devoted fans of Austen's who are looking for a representation that they personally feel fits their idea of what motivated her as a writer.

This is an imagined semi-biographical story of Jane Austen. It's around 1795, and Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) is a rebellious young woman before her great works. She forms a combative relationship with rogue Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) while her family wants a more aristocratic match in Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox) and stability of money.

It's very doubtful that this has much relationship to reality, but it's still a very good movie. Hathaway and McAvoy are great young actors, and they have magnetic chemistry. It's really an interesting way to create an Austen-like story by using her own life. And I do like the ending and the depressing tone no matter how little it has to do with her true life. We must allow for poetic license. I do wish for a faster start to the drama. Once it gets started, there are great performances such as Julie Walters as Jane's mother in addition to the two leads. I like to think of this as a Jane Austen novel that she never got to write herself.

Although I can be considered a Jane Austen addicted, it took me a long time before watching this movie, since I feared it was a melodramatic, sentimentalist and inconsistent pseudo-biography of the English novelist. Indeed, my fears were confirmed when I saw it, the movie proves much inconsistency, and has nothing to do with Austen's life and inner world, as it can be inferred from her novels, since we do not know much about her biography.

Let's say that this story between the roguish Tom Lefroy and her is pure fiction, this man in only mentioned twice in Jane's letters to her sister Cassandra, but no love story has ever been recorded. I think the director and the producer, on the wave of Jane Austen's cinematographic revival and success of recent years, aimed at making a pleasant, audience-attracting movie (and in fact they chose an Anne Hathaway, whose stunning beauty is by itself attractive, but very far from Austen's physical appearance). They made a work of juxtaposition between her literary production and her quite unknown personal life, and interpreted her life according to the plot of her novels, mainly Pride and Prejudice, but again disregarding the true nature of her inner struggles and motivations. This improbable, mainly considering Austen's secluded and never independent life, love story is romantic, seductive, but the complexity of her inner world and the world of her heroines, is totally missing.

In this way, the final product is enjoyable, the always charming English (and Irish) locations contribute greatly to an overall agreeable perception. Whenever I see or visit some English countryside, or mansion, I immediately fall in love with them, that's why I could probably never dislike such a movie completely , but it totally missed the point, and leaves much to be desired, in terms of rendering something vaguely true about the English novelist (but this was not probably the point of the production, as I said before). In the end, the movie can be viewed as a pleasant, amusing, and well acted fiction of a young, beautiful lady, fond of Jane Austen and trying to experience in life what she read in novels, wanting to become Jane but never turning into her.

I have to say that I enjoyed it. I think there were some problems with it, but overall a nice film. Hathaway's accent is very good apart from a couple of very minor slips that could almost go unnoticed. The film, the person I went with said, was a little too slow in places, but I did not find this so. I think that the director perhaps put a little too much emphasis on Austen's inspirations for her novels and in particular Pride and Prejudice, but I did not mind this too much as that is my favourite novel. The acting all round was very good. MaCavoy played it nicely, giving a lot of energy. I thought that the opening and closing were perhaps a little weak. I don't want to say too much in case others have not seen it yet (though of course most know the ending, they may not know the films interpretation of it). Perhaps the only few weaknesses to the film was the fact that perhaps Hathaway was too pretty to play Austen, though she did a very competent job indeed. I think that Anna Maxwell Martin may perhaps have been more suited?! The other is that I would have liked to have seen slightly more quick wittedness on the part of Jane. She was shown as competent, but not as cutting and quick as I and, I imagine, many believe she was. However, despite this I quite enjoyed the film, and wouldn't mind watching it again. It is better that Pride and Prejudice 2005 adaptation in my opinion. 8/10.

I was fortunate to come across an article explaining this film. It is a speculative fiction based upon a few facts. Speculation was aroused by the fact that a woman who never married and apparently never had a love affair came to have such a deep and intelligent understanding of relationships. I shan't expand on how potentially offensive that is. But story line is based on a few simple facts. While he was in the country Jane Austen would have almost certainly met Mr Lefroy; while on a journey to see her sister she had a rather long stop off in London during which time she began writing Pride and Prejudice and there was the mention of some letters.

It started out so well; the stifling quiet of a country life broken by our future genius at work. The structure of this opening sequence was very effective. I was thinking I'm going to love this film. But there was a niggling in the back of my mind. None of the reviews had been great, but I didn't know why (I hadn't actually read any only seen the 2 ½ or 3 stars).

I continued thinking it was wonderful through most of the film. James McAvoy was beautifully intense, Anne Hathaway was solid, Maggie Smith delightfully amusing and Anna Maxwell Martin underused. There were some beautiful scenes, some so intense. For example a scene in a ball when they are both standing back to back apparently to talking other people but having a very deep conversation.

But then, as with far too many movies we moved through the climax to an ending of this story line and that story line oh and we'd better conclude this one as well and now everything is tied up in a neat little bundle.

This is a film that would have benefited from an ambivalent ending, because, aside from the fact that we know she ends up the Western World's highest selling female author the film wasn't actually about that. The film was about the journey toward it. To have left us hanging when, perhaps, she was leaving Lefroy or back in her stiflingly quiet house would have been much more effective in terms of the story and strengthened the film. It simply is not a happy ending but they tried their damned well hardest to make it one.

I'm afraid I must give this a very generous 7 rather than what could have been a deserving 8 had the film makers (or the studio or whoever the twats are that decide on these things) the courage to make this a film, not Hollywood.