Jane

Seldom does one go to a movie with high expectations and ends up having them fulfilled, but Becoming Jane is an exception in this case. I was charmed by Anne Hathaway's turn in Brokeback Mountain and The Devil Wears Prada and couldn't really understand the outcry resulting in her being cast as Jane Austen and after having watched the movie I know for sure Anne Hathaway was the right person for the role.

Hot on the heels of 2005's Pride and Prejudice this movie offers a look into the early years of a spirited Jane Austen and her encounter with a man who could have formed the basis of one of her most famous literary characters Mr Darcy.

I have to say this movie is without a doubt one of the BEST period films I have ever seen. Not only is it visually stunning but the performances from everyone are superb.

Maggie Smith a delightful as the shrewd old Aunt.

Julie Walters excellent as the mother who would give anything to knock some sense into her daughter ( Jane Austen that is ).

Anna Maxwell Martin is also very good as the sister and confidante of Jane Austen.

The director Julian Jarrold has done a wonderful job of making an amazing movie that will appeal to all generations.

And finally the two very charming leads who are the very heart of the movie : Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy. In one word both are AWESOME. James although has little screen time then Anne makes you understand the sheer cockiness and arrogance of Tom Lefroy, from his live free attitude in life to his transformation as a man who begins to care for Jane Austen.His chemistry with Anne Hathaway is sizzling and a very important factor in maintaining the movie's momentum.

And at last to the leading lady Anne Hathaway. The lady is a marvel as Jane Austen, her determination and spark is vividly captured by Anne in what can be called a very career defining performance. Not only does one feel the pain for Jane but one does marvel at what holds her together and her writing makes her pull through in life.It is Anne Hathaway's spirited portrayal of the literary icon that forms the essence of the movie.

From her determination to write and her heart break to her feisty attitude to succeed as a writer is uniquely captures by the young actress. One can't really find the exact words to describe the actress's performance as Jane Austen , which is if simply put great.

This movie has the makings to become the period drama of the year. A fine job by the actors and entire crew of the movie for giving us an insight to what could have been very important years in the young authors life.

A delight to watch in every sense 8/10

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 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.

Hollywood can't seem to get enough of dead female English writers. Hot on the heels of Miss Potter, and in advance of films about the Brontes, we have this romantic confection about Jane Austen's youthful fling with Irish barrister Tom Lefroy.

There have already been howls of criticism from outraged Janeites that the film is historically inaccurate. It's true that English teachers will have a fit at some elements of the story: at best speculative and unsubstantiated, at worst downright erroneous. The filmmakers admittedly didn't have a lot of historical material to work from. The true background to the story is contained in a couple of letters written by Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, and an admission by Tom Lefroy in old age that he had once been in 'boyish love' with the writer. On this slightly shaky platform, the filmmakers have built a story of repressed passion and defiance of social mores that is a work of fiction worthy of a novel in its own right.

This doesn't really matter. Nobody in their right mind would ever accept the version of events presented by a Hollywood biopic as historical gospel. The only viewers who will be taken in by the story seen here will be those who are too lazy, too uninterested or too credulous to do the modicum of research needed to find out the real facts, and who cares what such people think? This film may be largely untrue, but what really matters is whether it works on its own terms, qua film.

Unfortunately, it doesn't, or at least not entirely. The main reason for this is the underlying premise. It is implied that without Jane and Tom's youthful affair Jane Austen would never have written her six great novels, and in particular (perhaps because it's the most familiar to audiences) Pride and Prejudice. We see Jane angrily destroying a juvenile story criticized by Tom, and later, in the throes of love, bashing out the first draft of P & P (in a single night, which shows an impressive turn of speed). It's plain that, as Tom tells her, 'experience is vital'.

The same clunkingly literal idea – that an artist must experience emotions in order to write about them successfully - underscored Shakespeare in Love, but there it was handled with a rather lighter touch. Here we are asked to believe that Pride and Prejudice was not a distillation of all Jane Austen's youthful experiences enlivened by a vivid imagination, a sharp sense of humour and a dollop of literary genius, but the next best thing to a true story. The reasons for this approach are obvious: cinema can dramatize Johnny Cash learning the guitar, or Picasso experimenting with paint, but the spectacle of a writer sitting at a desk dreaming and scribbling palls pretty rapidly.

The irony of a film that takes such wild liberties with the facts relying upon this trite old idea would certainly have been apparent to Jane Austen, whose mastery of irony is emphasized rather unsubtly throughout. Moreover, it's intellectually dishonest; lacking the ability to create a Mr Darcy, the filmmakers borrow freely from Jane Austen's characterisation in creating Tom, and thereby cheekily suggest that the author was the one who lacked the imagination to make such a person up.

These reservations aside, does the film have anything going for it? Yes. The script has some witty moments and at least makes a decent stab at realistic 18th century dialogue. Ireland is a surprisingly effective and gorgeous substitute for Hampshire, and the autumnal palette of washed-out greens and greys is appropriately sombre. Anne Hathaway is an attractively skittish and impetuous Jane, and she has excellent chemistry with James McAvoy, whose performance as Tom, by turns mercurial and obsessive, is well up to his usual high standards. Reliable support comes from James Cromwell, Julie Walters, the late great Ian Richardson and Maggie Smith, who essentially reprises her character from Gosford Park. The problem is that the lovers' behaviour never really convinces us that this relationship was the foundation of Jane Austen's later literary success, and ultimately peters out into a series of implausible endings, the number of which gives Hot Fuzz and The Return of the King a run for their money. Becoming Jane isn't an awful film, but it doesn't make the grade as a Regency Brief Encounter.

I knew very little about this film before I went to see it - I think the trailer was the sum total of what I had heard. Now, I know very little about Jane Austen or her life so am considering Becoming Jane simply as a film loosely based on/inspired by her life.

The film tells the story of a young woman, Jane, who refuses to marry purely for money and embarks on writing to support herself rather than relying on a husband.

The story is well told, with excellent performances all round (especially Anne Hathaway and the always brilliant James Cromwell). The pace is maybe a little slow at times and Jane herself can be rather annoying and contradictory but that simply shows the flaws of human nature rather than being a criticism of the film per se.

Visually the film was stunning. Brilliant scenery, excellent costumes. All used to great effect to enhance the film without ever becoming overpowering or distracting from the story.

Overall, this was an enjoyable film, if not up there with Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility in my opinion. Well worth a watch (unless you are going to be annoyed by every little inaccuracy) but probably not worth adding to the DVD collection.