The Frame

During the first half of this film about a fictionalized Jane Austen’s love life, I wrote a lot of notes faulting Anne Hathaway’s performance, clumsy editing, muddy and inconsistent sound, and other issues that suggested the film wasn’t quite ready for release. By the end, most of these issues had either gone away or I wasn’t noticing them anymore, which is generally a good thing. The script still suffers due to being written by people much less talented than Jane Austen–the romance isn’t really believable; it attempts to follow the trajectory of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, but forgets to include any exploration of the change in Jane’s attitude toward her would-be paramour. Maggie Smith owns the screen for her all-too-brief scenes as the inspiration of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Becoming Jane isn’t a great film, and certainly it does little to illuminate Jane Austen or Pride and Prejudice, but it’s a relatively harmless and enjoyable way to kill an afternoon.
Average