Jane Austen Book Club

by Danielle Kurtzleben

You can’t blame a movie studio for wanting to get more butts in the seats. The posters for The Jane Austen Book Club have the tagline, “You don’t have to know the books to be in the club” above an open book, its pages curved into the shape of a heart — reassuring potential moviegoers that the film is not inscrutable to everyone but literature scholars, and that there will be a healthy dose of romance. Indeed, enjoying Book Club does not require advance reading, and there is plenty of romantic angst and bliss to go around. But in the end, like any Austen book, the film is a delight, with more to offer than meets the eye. And for better or worse, like any Austen book, it is a crowd-pleaser.

The premise of The Jane Austen Book Club is simple: six variously connected people (five women, one man) form a book club centered on the six complete Jane Austen novels, focusing on one book per month. As the six move through the books, their lives take on echoes of the plotlines and themes of the books that they read.

Thanks in part to good casting, Book Club handles the problem of having not one but six central characters admirably and intelligently. Each character is allowed one or two defining characteristics — Sylvia, the uncertain recent divorcee (Amy Brenneman); her daughter, Allegra, the self-absorbed bohemian (Maggie Grace); the aptly-named Prudie (a hilariously uptight Emily Blunt); the clueless but endearing Grigg (Hugh Dancy), and so on. With its capable cast (which also includes Maria Bello and a wonderful Kathy Baker), the characters become well-rounded, despite their one-dimensional set-ups.

Book Club is at its strongest when it is at its most unapologetic — reveling in its literary theme and being unabashedly feminine. The women in the book club convey genuine excitement over Austen’s characters, making a convert of Grigg, as well as a few of their husbands and lovers. (Herein also lies a post-modern gem for Austen-lovers: love doesn’t conquer all; Austen conquers all, even saving a marriage or two in the process.) Furthermore, Book Club is one of the few recent mass-market films to feature a cast made up of mostly (gasp!) middle-aged women who are gorgeous in spite of (one might say because of) not trying to starve, sex, or makeup themselves younger. (Sad, really, that one needs to congratulate a film on this modest achievement.)

The Jane Austen Book Club is not without its faults, of course. The setting is ridiculously upper-middle-class, with wines and dog-breeding and Whole Foods abounding. Robin Swicord (director and screenwriter) and Karen Joy Fowler (author of the novel upon which the film is based) are painfully drawn to cliché — the groundbreaking use of skydiving as a symbol for youth and freedom (yawn), for example. Perhaps most inexplicable is the treatment of the lesbianism of Ms. Grace’s Allegra… namely, the fact that all of her scenes alone with her (also gorgeous) partner are softly-lit, with soft music, and take place in either a bed or a bathtub. One hopes (please, God) this is tongue-in-cheek… but somehow it seems unlikely. Such slip-ups are ridiculous in a movie that is otherwise subtle and witty.

One further caveat is that there is book-themed dialog that will be meaningless to the Austen virgin. But, as the tagline would suggest, don’t let that stop you from seeing this film. Book Club is smart and funny in its exploration of romantic idioms, and is worth a viewing, if only as a palate-cleanser to the sanitized and dumbed-down romantic comedy.