Amore e inganni

"Facts are horrid things." Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale)

We have lived through countless adaptations of Jane Austen's late 18th and early 19th-century romances, not the least Pride and Prejudice, but I guarantee none of us has seen the likes of Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship, which uses Austen's novella, Lady Susan, as its source. The lady's quote above should give you the flavor of her sweet venom that manipulates the most stolid and wary gentleman.

Where the usual screen version is chock-full of sumptuous estates, carriages, and costumes, Stillman's take starts with rich language, at times delivered with screwball pace, and adds the other elements as mere backdrop to drop-dead acid discourse with the upper-class men ample fodder for Austen's satirical pen.

Any man's match and then some, the Lady says this about Stephen Fry's Mr. Johnson, "Too old to be governable, and too young to die." When she learns that he could serve his wife a punishment by moving to Connecticut, Lady Susan says, "You could be scalped." Even the Americans are not spared her withering estimation.

As a woman in a man's world, Lady Susan navigates the best way she can: Her tongue and her lovely visage are formidable weapons in her quest to provide comfortable living for herself and her underachieving daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark).

Even the sub-plots are masterfully rendered, humorous in themselves but never overshadowing the main action of Lady Susan working everyone for her comfort and advancement. When Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) is in a scene, watch a future comedy star in the making, but note how he doesn't dominate the scene but rather enriches it with his endearing blockheadness.

Love & Friendship is one of the finest Austen adaptations in film history and surely a brilliant testimony to the enduring charm of romance and its hyper-form, the screwball comedy.

Here's my beef with Love and Friendship. They told the story. Emphasis on told. Not sure if they didn't know how to build the character backgrounds and cultural implications into an hour and a half-ish flick or what. It's like they assumed you understood some things but, needed to explain the bulk of the story via Lady Susan. Instead of building the story via scenes and acting and playing out the idea and letting the audience think and work out the connections....leave a little to figure out if you got it right or not, Beckinsale's character basically narrarated everything that was going on. As we walked out, I said to my wife, Downton Abbey left a pretty high bar for period pieces. The Jane Austin story of relationships and status and morality was interesting enough. The presentation just plain left it all in the book. You read a book, and you know you're reading a book. Director Stillman just had the book read to us by actors. It wasn't as interesting as that may sound either. I don't know if it was budget over directing but, this was a disappointing movie-fication of a book. Even the period environment was stumbling and stiff. Oh yeah, a hand maiden should do this. Oh yeah, the footman or, doorman or butler would do this. It came across as a poorly staged amateur play, where there was no fluidity. Other reviews said you'd be laughing out loud. Maybe a few snickers and giggles. I was glad it was only 90-ish minutes. If you're coming to this because Downton Abbey made you a fan of that period of England, I'm sorry to tell you, you won't be satisfied by Love and Friendship.

Something is tonally off about "Love & Friendship," Whit Stillman's screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novella. Stillman treats the film like a satire of Jane Austen, with all of the actors moving through the film practically winking at the camera to acknowledge they're playing dress up. The problem with that approach is that Austen was already a crack satirist herself. Therefore, the film doubles the emotional distance between the audience and the characters, so we have a hard time caring much about what happens to any of them.

Another big problem is the casting. Kate Beckinsale is a lovely actress, and she does imperious and haughty well. But her character is in virtually every scene, and she's supposed to be so irresistible that she can manipulate anyone to do anything she wants. Beckinsale doesn't have that kind of allure; she's technically proficient at hitting her marks, but she doesn't have the screen presence to carry this really rather despicable character off. I'm stumped to think of a modern-day actress who could, but Vivien Leigh would have been perfect in a role like this. The poor casting extends to other members of the cast as well, most egregiously to Chloe Sevigny, who is far too contemporary an actress to be believable in a period piece. Most everyone else in the film is a drip, with the sole exception of Tom Bennett, who plays a bumbling suitor brilliantly and enlivens the picture every time he's on screen. Would that the whole film had been as funny and engaging as his performance.

With Stillman maintaining too much of an ironical distance from the action, the film turns into a talky succession of drawing rooms conversations that don't amount to much of anything save a procession of pretty period gowns.

Grade: B-

"Love And Friendship" is not classified as a comedy but that's the only way it succeeds. Our website calls it a drama/romance but those labels don't capture the essence of Jane Austen's late 18th century novella, gorgeously filmed and impeccably acted by a predominantly British cast.

In a nutshell; Lady Susan is recently widowed and now relies on the kindness of friends and relatives for shelter as she is very short of money. So she bounces from estate to estate endearing herself to the menfolk and is notorious among the ladies. Lady Susan is very beautiful and flirtatious; a husband is needed to achieve stability as well as position, not to mention a reliable source of income (We have to infer much of this information from the plot; Lady Susan is not a flamboyant character, like Auntie Mame).

"Love And Friendship" sports first class production values as well as a sophisticated literary background. Kate Beckinsale is good as Lady Susan and the rest of the cast is even better. Midway through the film gets a needed boost from Tom Bennett, who plays the oafish Sir James Martin. He is an oasis in the midst of the arid screenplay, which cries for more of his bumbling presence.

This is a movie for grownups in a landscape festooned with juvenile entertainment. It is difficult to find fault with any part of this handsomely mounted production which is graced by Jane Austen's relentlessly clever dialogue and the skilled direction of Whit Stillman ("Metropolitan", "The Last Days Of Disco"). Well done all around despite the bland storyline.

Kate Beckinsale trades in her latex for hats and crinolines to take on Jane Austen in this moderately tongue-in-cheek adaptation of her posthumously-published novella in which pert modern misses Beckinsale & Sevigny dress up in a succession of magnificent period creations and sit about talking (and talking) about, well, love and friendship rather as Whit Stillman's characters used to do in twentieth century Manhattan.

It's all agreeable and good-looking, although the settings feel totally unlived in and everybody sounds as if they're simply reciting dialogue they've memorised in advance. Which of course they have.