→ August 30, 2016
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Love and Friendship.

My latest Insider post discusses why September prospect callups are a thing of the past.

If it’s possible for a Jane Austen work to be unknown, her novella Lady Susan likely qualifies. Written before her six completed novels but unpublished until fifty years after her death, the shortepistolary work tells the story of the widowed Susan’s attempts to marry off her daughter to a wealthy, amiable dunce, as well as her own juggling of affairs with two men, one the married Lord Mainwaring, one her sister-in-law’s brother Reginald de Courcy. As in most of Austen’s works, Lady Susan is full of dry wit, and the pressing need for women of that era to marry well for their own financial security is a major plot point.

American director Whit Stillman adapted the work for the 2016 film Love & Friendship (amazon • iTunes), which peculiarly takes its name from an entirely separate work written by Austen as a teenager (with the title misspelled as “Love & Freindship”) and stars Kate Beckinsale as the conniving seductress of the novella’s title. Stillman’s direction is heavyhanded at times, but the dialogue is sharp and sparkling, while the key performances, especially Beckinsale’s, absolutely carry the film.

As the movie opens, Lady Susan is seen leaving the Mainwarings’ estate, having been thrown out by Lady Mainwaring – who is in hysterics every time she’s on screen – and arrives at Churchill, the estate of her late husband’s sister and her family, having nowhere else to go. Shortly after her arrival, she begins her temptation of Reginald, the young, handsome brother of Lady Vernon, an eligible bachelor who is intelligent but naive and quickly succumbs to the beautiful and more worldly Lady Susan’s efforts. The plot thickens when Lady Susan’s daughter, Frederica, arrives, trailed by the amiable dunce Sir James Martin, who has £10,000 a year and is as dumb as a sack of hair (although one of the script’s greatest strengths is making comedy gold of Sir James’ stupidity). Frederica wants no part of Sir James, while Lady Susan, who cares little for her daughter except as a means to a lucrative end, tries to put her maternal foot down, a move that eventually causes a conflict between her and her late husband’s entire family.

Austen’s plots are all straightforward, but she never crafted another central character as venal as Lady Susan, whom Beckinsale plays to the hilt as by turns coquettish and condescending. Beckinsale, now 43, fits Austen’s description of Lady Susan (“from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five and twenty, though she must in fact be ten years older”) quite well, but given her history of playing one-dimensional characters in mass-market action films, her acting prowess here came as a pleasant surprise; her performance drips with disdain for just about everyone around her, except her American friend Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), who appears to live vicariously through her avaricious friend. (The character’s nationality is unspecified in Austen’s novella, and Sevigny’s American accent is jarring amidst all of the upper-class British characers.) Beckinsale has to drive the film, as she’s at the center of every strand of the plot, but she does so with alacrity.

The one other key performance is Tom Bennett’s turn as Sir James Martin, looking and sounding a bit like Discount Colin Firth but managing to pull off his performance of an extremely likable, well-meaning dimwit, to the point where the viewer has real empathy for him even while understanding why Frederica might balk at his companionship. Although the trailer highlighted Sir James’ confusion over Churchill boasting neither church nor hill, his scene around the “twelve commandments” was the film’s real comic highlight.

We get just a bit of Stephen Fry as Lady Johnson’s husband and Lady Mainwaring’s guardian, but he’s woefully underutilized, as are Jemma Redgrave and James Fleet (Four Weddings and a Funeral) as DeCourcy’s parents. But the novella itself comprises mostly letters from Lady Susan, so Stillman’s script had to invent much of the dialogue and reimagine most of the characters beyond hers. He was more deft with that than with some of the peculiar shots in the film, from the odd way the characters are introduced to the strange close-ups we get of characters (one near the end of Lord Mainwaring looked like a mistake) at various points. Lady Susan is a trifle of a story compared to Austen’s novels, so the challenge for Stillman here was greater than it might have been in adapting Emma or Persuasion, but he and Beckinsale in particular have developed it into a fast-paced, often hilarious movie where no one gets what they want yet Lady Susan still seems to come out on top.

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→ March 8, 2009
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A Simple Story.

This has nothing to do with the book, but this Guardian review of six new flavors of Walker’s potato chips is pretty funny.

Anyway, the title of Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1790 novel A Simple Story is, one assumes intentionally, ironic, as the story is not simple, and isn’t even a story; it is, in fact, two stories in four volumes, the first two of which constituted a first draft of the novel that was never published. The first part is a somewhat classic if oddly set romance of the period, mixing serious material with witty banter, but the second part is a dramatic statement on social mores of the day, especially those that pertained to women’s roles and treatment.

The two halves of the novel do read like separate books, joined only by the common male lead, Mr. Dorriforth. The first half tells of the frustrated romance between Dorriforth and his ward, the orphaned Miss Milner, an intelligent, witty girl whose lack of any real education leaves her somewhat ill-prepared for the world of manners and rules into which she is thrust. The dialogue in this first half (Miss Milner: “As my guardian, I certainly did obey him; and I could obey him as a husband; but as a lover I will not.”) is clever and unusually quick for a novel of that time, but I didn’t find the story that compelling; if Inchbald had published those two volumes alone as a novel, the title might have fit better but the book would have been unlikely to meet with commercial success.

The second half is set sixteen years after their ill-fated marriage; the now Lady Elmwood and her daughter, Matilda, have been cast out of the manor, and Lord Elmwood (Dorriforth) refuses to so much as see his daughter because of his ire at his wife. The barely-contained – and sometimes uncontained – rage of Dorriforth burns the pages, while Inchbald tells a second story of male/female relations in late 18th-century England, casting the male as the villain without making him evil or one-dimensional. The subservient positions in which women are placed and the roles their upbringings played in placing them there are openly questioned, themes that have lost most of their relevance but were probably topical at the time the book was published.

Inchbald is perhaps better known today for writing the play, Lovers’ Vows, performed by Fanny Price and her wacko relations in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which makes A Simple Story interesting for its likely influence on Austen and perhaps the Brontë sisters. The witty dialogue between Miss Milner and Dorriforth in the first part is reminiscent of Austen’s wittier works like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, while Lord Elmwood seems a clear prototype for the dark, brooding male protagonists in Jane Eyre and (more strongly) in Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, if you’ve read Austen and either Brontë and didn’t care for them, I can’t see you enjoying A Simple Story either.

Next up: Henry Miller’s, um, profane Tropic of Cancer.

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→ February 7, 2008
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Mansfield Park adaptation.

So we just finished the Masterpiece Theatre showing of the new adaptation of Mansfield Park, and it was enjoyable as a trifle of a movie, but dreadful as an adaptation. I simply could not get past Billie Piper, in the lead role of Fanny Price, as a brunette who dyed her hair blonde in the early 1800s … and then couldn’t be bothered to do her eyebrows!

Mansfield Park is easily my least favorite of Austen’s novels due to its wimpy protagonist, despite all of Fanny’s defender’s claims of her “quiet strength,” which is revisionist bullshit – she’s a damned wimp and even in the one time when she stands up for herself, she’s sorry to have made others around her upset. There’s nice, and then there’s doormat. Fanny Price is a doormat.

The adaptation has turned this somewhat dark novel into a paper-thin romantic intrigue. All of the tension of the novel is gone. Mrs. Norris (yes, like the cat in the Harry Potter series, although here she is a live person) spends the novel tormenting Fanny at every turn; she’s scarcely in the movie at all. In the novel, when Fanny rejects the advances of Henry Crawford, the entire family (she’s staying with her aunt and uncle) turns on her in a relentless attempt to persuade her to accept his proposal, ultimately sending her back to her own poor family as a punishment. Here, she’s not invited on a day trip, and before we know it, Henry has run off with her sister – an event which, by the way, is a total shock in the novel and yet is foreshadowed in the first twenty minutes of the film. And so on. There is no tension in the movie, yet the book is wracked with it. At worst, couldn’t the screenwriters have found some middle ground.

I’m not the only Janeite who thinks so, for what it’s worth – the second of those links focuses on yet more unladylike behavior, as we saw in the new take on Persuasion. I admit that it’s a hard novel to adapt because a faithful version would be oppressive and bleak, but let’s at least stay true to the time period.

The Complete Jane Austen series is continuing with the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice shown in three parts, starting this Sunday; it is well worth watching in its own right, but also stands as perhaps the supreme literary adaptation, period. The series then breaks, resuming on March 23rd with another old edition, this time of Emma, starring Kate Beckinsale.

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