Austenland: a film still in the draft stage?

The fake come-on (Jane Seymour) with which the film opens

The innocent heroine (Keri Russell) taken in — note the trope of the heroine as narrator and writer of diaries (something seen thoughout the Austen film canon)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to write about this film for some time; I saw it a couple of months ago now when I was watching several new Austen movies since I had had to put down my book project down two summers ago now. I try to keep an open mind on the Austen film canon, and find that most of the time either Austen is kept to sufficiently or the intermediary book or script is sufficiently intelligent and kept to so there is much worth while in the movie — as long as to some extent they keep crucial aspects of the original book. This is true of the 2013 Scents and Sensibility. They keep a lot of the original story and character oppositions and themes. Another type builds on the original story while keeping it in mind Clueless, the Bridget Jones movies, the Jane Austen Book Club and Death comes to Pemberley. These have an intermediary book (even Clueless).   Lost in Austen lacks the intermediary connection, and while apparently departing from the P&P radically, when watched with attention Lost in Austen is clearly a critique of some of Austen’s attitudes in Pride and Prejudice as well as showing up gaps or difficulties in the book itself. I suggest Austenland meant to do the same and is a daring kind of venture.

Here Keri is meant to evoke Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz — before she leaves Kansas

The problem with Austenland (I decided tentatively) is it’s at that stage of production you sometimes hear about in franker features. In discussing how it took 6 (!) years to produce From Prada to Nada, the directors and screenplay writers said at one point they had a completed movie but knew it was very weak; their fundamental idea had not worked in the way they thought it could dramatically. They felt they had to reconceive the work, this time with far more emphasis on the Hispanic background of the appropriation. Funding was needed and to get all the actors back together again, but they managed it.

This is a movie released at a stage when it is a draft. Until the romantic abject coda ending which made nonsense of all that had gone, it seems to me that Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale (director and screenplay writers) had a movie like Lost in Austen in mind. All the decor in the movie identified as “Austen” like was absurd, rather like some Hallmark card at Christmas time by someone who knows little of Christmas objects (what they are for). The idea sarcastic: the ignorance of the vast fan base about the 18th century and Austen too is the point. The problem here was to come out clearly on this you have to insult the audience. The second important inference is that if you went to a theme park and had any brains you would soon see you are being fleeced and all around you actors who despise you and are using you. That’s what happens when our heroine Jane Hanes (Keri Russell, a popular “good girl” ingenue) shows up. Again if the audience truly takes this in, you are insulting them.

Jane’s incorrectly dressed: her poke bonnet belongs to an American cowboy movie

The problem here is these ideas are tough (tougher than critiquing an 18th century novel and romance as is done in Lost in Austen) and the film-makers also wanted to do light and screwball comedy.

Georgia King as pouting Lady Amelia Heartright (her heart’s in the right place) flooring Darcy as she tries to pretend she’s got a cell phone

A further complication is what movie-makers think is comic in our anti-feminist pop culture so one of the two actresses, Jennifer Coolidge as Miss Elizabeth Charming, who takes this tour is dressed like some version of Dolly Parton and enacts the stupidity of Judy Holiday’s characters: to soften this she is made good-natured if occasionally sullen since she realizes she is not enjoying herself.

Her clothes way too tight

Pretending “perfect unconcern” like Austen’s Lydia

The result is imbecility. The movie is racialist too because Ricky Whittle as Captain East was done up as a very sexy African-American or African-English man hired to be a Willoughby or sexy-male taking advantage of the secondary comic kittenish heroine, Lady Amelia

She’s not altogether against being beat up

Behind this was the myth that black men are sexier.

A few good actors were wasted. JJFeild who can speak older English and can do romance was Mr Henry Nobley a cross between a feeble version of Mr Knightley (as he has nothing to do) and a withdrawn Darcy figure (Feild was Henry Tilney in an excellent Northanger Abbey, scripted by Andrew Davies):

James Callis who can be very funny (in the Bridget Jones movies he is the male friend) was thrown away as an effete gay (homosexual) man, again pandering to stereotypes — the weak sidekick to Darcy.

Jane Seymour who has impressed me as having brains but never seems to hold out for sharp roles she might enact was the crook-woman, an utter snob, running the establishment, and there were whiffs of a Lady Catherine de Bourgh imitation but it never quite came off since she was not a character who super-respected herself.

Martin (Wickham character) and Jane (Elizabeth-Jane Austen?) kiss and tumble about in the grass (Keri Russell and Brett Mackenzie)

The wet-shirt scene is Martin or Wickham’s — de rigueur

The secondary romance of Martin as a stable groom, with Jane (a la Elizabeth Bennet fooled by Wickham in P&P) gradually emerges. Martin is a sort of romantic refuge from say the really tough or gritty depiction of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the gamekeeper on the estate – he turns out to be an actor and is exposed as far more phony than Mr Henry Nobley.  Mr Nobley does not try to hide that he is a hired actor while Martin does. Martin is the closest the movie got to Wickham. Last seen he is promiscuously chatting up someone in an obligatory end-of-movie festival scene — not explained what this was all about, it seemed suddenly a circus had come to the vacation estate from a nearby English town. Here like Lost in Austen, it lost the courage of a conviction Wickham is bad news for women: like several of the recent Austen films, it was openly sympathetic to Wickham.

Alas as I said, the faux festival scene was not the end of the movie. It might have had some bite if at least it had left Jane to go home utterly disillusioned, knowing that what she had dreamed of was nonsense, based on no knowledge, fake through and through ideas about men and sexual romance. But no suddenly there is Mr Nobley dressed in ordinary 21st century dress and we have a reprise of abject romance reminding me of the tacked-on nature of the ending of Joe Wright’s 2005 P&P. And we have to have poetic justice so the actor playing Wickham is exposed at the airport (waiting for his plane):

Certain details in the film suggest a draft stage — unfinished. For example, Jane’s friend, Molly (?Ayda Field) at home in the US who tells Jane she is a fool.  Molly hopes the big sum and time Jane has thrown away upon this “vacation” will be well spent if Jane comes home and throws all the cutesy little girl junk out of her room. Meanwhile Molly has gotten pregnant. This is slowly revealed in the opening segment and the travel agency.

But we never see her again, her pregnancy is never explained, or what she is doing living with Jane. She is the equivalent of the vestigial Margaret in Austen’s own S&S, only that there is nothing brought into the film worthwhile to justify keeping her.

One telling detail — common among the earlier and still most of the Austen film canon — marking it as a Jane Austen film is no woman loses her virginity during the film.  There is no overt sexual act at all. Rare films to break this taboo include Maggie Wadey’s 1986 Northanger Abbey; Victor Nunez’s 1993 Ruby in Paradise (Ruby fights off an attempted rape by the John Thorpe character) and Angel Garcia’s 2011 From Prada to Nada (Mary’s Willoughbhy immediately betrays her by deserting and then shows her he was married, a double twist since she was wanting to marry him partly for his money).

Jerusha and Hale needed to put the film in the can, wait a couple of years, hire everyone back, re-write, re-think and try again. The premise is not bad — women are allowing themselves to be fleeced by the Austen establishment (hotels, convention sites, amusement parks, movie-makers, sequel writers). I note the screenplay writer, director and three producers were all women. (I later discovered that Shannon Hale had written Austenland as a book too. But the film is worked out wholly inadequately or with shallow commercial pandering where thought and effort were needed.)

And then I watched it a third time — this time much earlier in the day and going slow capturing stills and taking down dialogue – -and I discover it’s much better than I thought. I still think it needed much work, still conclude it has weaknesses, but taken as a kind of mad absurdity, especially a play within the play, it’s witty and clever

Nobley dressing for play within play

The extravagance of the costumes and their parody of romance types was intriguing; I wish the film-makers had worked harder on this — revised and revised the way Austen herself might have done. It wasn’t daring enough to stay with its burlesque. The witty dialogues were not brought out sharply enough.

Count the anachronisms

Ellen