If your life is a Jane Austen novel, or if you have let the love of your life get away, jumped into a flawed relationship or set up your best friend with the man you didn’t know you wanted, you have that in common with the characters in “The Jane Austen Book Club” film.
The movie, written and directed by Robin Swicord and adapted from Karen Joy Fowler’s novel by the same name, reads like a bestseller you enjoyed, would even recommend, but most likely will never pick up again.
Humorous, but not funny. Cute, but not sexy.
With that said, you might be surprised by how quickly the at-once quirky and cliché characters grow on you, how easily you excuse the overacted personalities.
Despite the movie’s tendency to overstate the obvious and stick to stereotypes, you get pulled into “The Jane Austen Book Club” like a good first date – tentatively, but then for the whole night.
The circle of women with a love for Austen as a bond (and one enthusiastic young man who had never before read a page of the romance-charged classics) includes a freshly separated mother and lesbian daughter, a Chanel-wearing French teacher tempted by a hot high school boy, a yoga-going, organic-food-eating 50-something woman and a hipster with a penchant for bicycling and science fiction books.
The movie takes us through the month-by-month process of reading each of Austen’s books from “Pride and Prejudice” to “Emma,” never straying from the club’s “all Jane Austen all the time” maxim.
As a commentary on everyday life, the film displays the everyday gaffes and the larger mistakes in the matter of love that we all seem to make.
How we play in love is up to us, but as Austen’s novels and the book club shows us, there can be repercussions for those actions. But what really is so bad about being in an Austen novel? After all, her stories always end happily.
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