![]() ![]() ![]() ("Affection is desirable," she curtly intones. Walters, who plays Jane's mother, has a magnificently forceful bit when she chides her daughter for her naïve prerequisite of love before marriage. There are moments when messy bursts of humanity give Jarrold's film some edge. The whole movie feels like it's bound in a corset. But it soon became clear that the music was just the tip of the recycled iceberg Becoming Jane, for all of its professionalism and literary cred, wasn't offering a single scene that felt fresh or unexpected or (heaven forbid) spontaneous. This drowsiness may have originated with the first strains of Adrian Johnston's score, which sounded just like the score for every other British period romance you've ever seen. Yet while I was happily luxuriating in the design and performances, the strangest thing began happening: My eyelids started to get really heavy. ![]() A top-tier cast of British character actors (Julie Walters, Maggie Smith, the late Ian Richardson) led by an American ingénue (Anne Hathaway) with a serviceable English accent? Check. Impressive, detailed period design? Check. Clever, carefully constructed dialogue? Check. And during the first couple of reels, all was going well. So I was actually pretty psyched for Julian Jarrold's Becoming Jane, which imagines the author's life before her eventual success as a novelist, and suggests that the inspiration for Austen's love-struck characters stemmed from a thwarted love affair of her own. (I've seen film versions of Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, and Emma several times over.) In general, though, I enjoy works of this sort - it's always a relief to hear literate dialogue at the cineplex and, at the very least, tremendous casts keep showing up for these things - and I've especially enjoyed them when Jane Austen has been the creator of those wearing the corsets. I have friends, most of them equipped with a Y chromosome, who wouldn't be caught dead at an 18th century British period film studded with corsets and bucolic splendor and one of those "That man is so insolent and frustrating I must be in love with him!" storylines. ![]()
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