Becoming Jane

Director: Julian Jarrold
Screenwriters: Kevin Hood, Sarah Williams
Starring: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith, Laurence Fox, Ian Richardson
Running time: 120 mins
Certificate: PG

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen wrote about what she knew. It is slightly incongruous, therefore, that Becoming Jane, an examination of the English literary heroine’s early life, is almost entirely speculative. The film’s conceit is that Jane enjoyed a passionate, but ultimately doomed, romance with Tom Lefroy, a caddish dandy who later became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. The basis for this? A letter Jane wrote to her sister mentioning a “flirtation” with Lefroy and the fertile imagination of Hood and Williams, the film’s screenwriters. However, once you accept that Becoming Jane isn’t intended to be a full-scale biopic – but rather an artistic ramble between the limited facts – its quiet power is able to materialise.

Jane (Hathaway) is the daughter of a respectable but impoverished Hampshire vicar (Cromwell). Her mother (Walters) wants her to marry the gormless nephew of the local aristocrat (Fox) to safeguard her future in a time when marriage was the only career path for an upstanding woman. When the caddish, charismatic Lefroy is sent to her quiet Hampshire hamlet as punishment for his lavish London lifestyle, Jane’s fervent belief in marrying for love is revealed. They flirt vibrantly – Jane shows herself to be his physical as well as intellectual match when she beats him at cricket – but their romance appears to be doomed. Lefroy’s class-conscious uncle (Richardson) won’t allow his protégé to marry below his station and Jane’s parents have no dowry to offer her future husband.

Becoming Jane’s major flaw is that it tries to be too many things. Is it a witticism-laced romantic comedy or an examination of the 18th century social hierarchy? Is it a celebration of England’s greatest literary heroine or a propaganda piece showing Austen as a proto-feminist career woman who proved that sisters were doin’ it for themselves 200 years before Anita Roddick first hopped on a plane to Nigeria? Hathaway struggles to reconcile the different aspects of our heroine – her Jane is a little too pompous at times – but she becomes more convincing as the film progresses. She imbues the middle-aged Jane with a real sense of self-possessed dignity, her youthful belief in the power of possibility having been swept away by the cold, harsh facts of her birth. McAvoy is as lively and charismatic as he was in The Last King of Scotland and the support from Walters, Smith and Richardson is typically excellent.

In its final passages, when the full consequences of the social rules of the time are laid bare, Becoming Jane is at its most affecting. The film’s purpose – to show that Jane’s juvenile romanticism is crushed into prudence as she becomes aware of her standing of the world – is finally revealed. As Jane’s mother tells her, for a woman living in the 18th century, “Affection is desirable, but money is absolutely indispensable”.