By Armond White

The Jane Austen Book Club
Directed by Robin Swicord


The Jane Austen Book Club must be the first Hollywood film ever inspired by a dubious movie trend: The Classy Chick Flick. You know, the kind of film The New York Times used to call “literate,” meaning based on a book, using dialogue that sounds recited rather than spoken. And dull, such as the Jane Austen adaptations Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and the Merchant-Ivory versions of E.M. Forster and Henry James. This would even include a pseudo-serious, non-Anglo chick flick like Memoirs of a Geisha.

Robin Swicord, who wrote the Geisha screenplay, as well as the 1995 Little Women, makes her directing debut with The Jane Austen Book Club. Swicord’s literary sense isn’t exactly Camille Paglia; her movie is less “literate” than it is almost frighteningly ill-cinematic.

Swicord’s opening montage, showing the harried lives of the contemporary California women who gather to discuss Austen’s four major novels, is off-puttingly droll: people bungling, dropping things, various images of daily haphazards, plus Nora Ephron-style ineptitudes. Is Swicord’s point that life is unpredictable, unmanageable? Or is she merely clumsy, setting up oafishness as melodrama?

Her Austenophile characters are the middle-aged, multi-divorced Bernadette (Kathy Baker); the happily married Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), who is cheated on by her husband; the obstinately single dog-breeder Jocelyn (Maria Bello); lovelorn, French-speaking school teacher Prudie (Emily Blunt); and Allegra (Maggie Grace), Sylvia’s daughter and the token lesbian.

All readers and romantics, they treat Austen as a “He’s Just Not That Into You” self-help guru. Jocelyn even invites dot-commer Griggs (Hugh Dancy) to join the group discussions; she embodies Austenesque confusion about her own desires.
The romantic slapstick settles down, eventually, as Swicord concentrates on the women’s complications with and without men. But it never really gets past that first demonstration of both visual illiteracy and contrived experience. Swicord’s characters lack that recognizable relationship with literature that Whit Stillman’s characters showed in the 1990 Metropolitan, a truly Austen-like movie. Instead, Swicord uses Austen to disguise her reliance on chick flick conventions.

Swicord divides the film into segments where title cards announce each Austen work under consideration, but she never justifies that Marion-the-librarian’s conceit. The divisions don’t give structure to the various life dilemmas; they just disperse one’s concentration. Congratulated on our Austeniana, all that’s left to appreciate is the occasionally felicitous acting moment: Dancy demonstrating a young, horny Jack Lemmon quality; Blunt’s dangerous flirtation with high school student Kevin Zeger, which contrasts her incommunicado marriage to jock Marc Blucas (his against-type reading aloud to her is truly romantic).

Most of it’s so conventional that attentive moviegoers will be forced to recall that cast members Baker and Brenneman both recently appeared in Rodrigo Garcia Marquez’s Nine Lives, a very fine movie, a transcendent chick flick.

Problem is, The Jane Austen Book Club resembles a Lifetime Network original movie. Despite its high-toned, artsy antecedent, Swicord’s direction lacks fluency: that graceful, imaginative ease with visual expression that signifies real film artistry (and is currently on display in the problematic but striking and smooth-paced Man of My Life). Swicord’s homage to Austen is undistinguished. It hastens fond memories of Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s modernization of Austen’s Emma.