At the Movies Again

Anne Hatahaway is a fresh-faced and reliably lightweight actress, but she is all wrong to play Jane Austen, as she apparently does in "Becoming Jane Austen". My own ideal first choice to play Austen would be Kate Winslet. My second (and admittedly offbeat) choice would be Cate Blanchett. Granted, this is a movie about the teenaged Jane Austen, and neither Winslet nor Blanchett are teenagers. But that's what the magic of movies is all about.

As for Anne Hathaway, she is an extremely likable and attractive star, but she just doesn't seem capable of conveying the personality of the woman who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Emma and Mansfield Park. Nor does it seem like the screenplay will be giving her any help.

According to the invaluable Internet Movie Database, the film treats of young Jane's 'romance' with the 'handsome Irishman' Tom Lefroy. No doubt the few known facts will be juiced up and sexed up and served cold to today's dumbed down multiplex audience. No harm in it I guess. Those who truly know and love Jane Austen can take it or leave it alone (the movie, I mean). As for the others, who cares what they believe or don't believe about the great author?

And, as a reviewer points out on the IMDB. the same semi-fictional, light-romantic approach was used for Shakespeare In Love, and no one objected very strenuously to that film. Most viewers know better than to trust a big budget Hollywood biopic to deliver the true facts of anyone's life. Still...I think JA inspires a more protective love in her serious readership than Shakespeare does in his. So, I suspect Janneites will be up-in-arms over this flick.

In any event, it seems the one fact that Hollywood has never understood (or cannot accept) about writers is that they live mostly in their own heads. The worlds that they create are created out of their imaginations. Experience may be the smallest part of the mix. For a writer, or any other creative individual, a little experience can be made to go a long way. As Flannery O'Connor once observed, by the time a person reaches the age of six they have experience enough to fuel a lifetime of writing. As far as Jane Austen goes, we can never know for certain how serious and passionate her 'fling' with Tom Lefroy was, anymore than we can know the degree of her sexual experience, or even the extent of her sexual knowledge. All of these remain matters of hopeless speculation, for those so inclined to speculate. In the end, all that matters is the imagined worlds she left behind, worlds that have been capturing readers for some two hundred years now.

"Becoming Jane Austen" will do nothing to harm those worlds. It will come and go like most movies, leaving no footprints in the snow, destined to be quickly forgotten. Enjoy it if you like, or leave it alone