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I have a feeling that even Jane Austen herself would be a little bit surprised to find that now, 190 years after her death, she’s as popular as ever. Just a couple of months ago, Anne Hathaway played her in Becoming Jane. And it seems like every week there’s a new book about her…or about her books…or about people who love her books arriving in bookstores. It’s enough to make all of us literature geeks who lived on Jane Austen in college feel almost hip.
The latest cinematic offering for Jane Austen hipsters is The Jane Austen Book Club—the story of a group of women (and one man) who decide to escape their own lives by immersing themselves in one of Jane Austen’s six books each month. When their first meeting commences, prim-and-proper high school teacher Prudie (Emily Blunt) is fuming over the fact that her Neanderthal husband, Dean (Marc Blucas), just canceled their trip to Paris in favor of a basketball game. Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) has just found out that her husband, Daniel (Jimmy Smits), is leaving her for another woman. And Jocelyn (Maria Bello), a dog breeder who’s never married, is mourning the loss of her beloved dog. Their friend, Bernadette (Kathy Baker), who’s thinking about looking for a seventh husband, decides that what they all need is a little Jane Austen. So they talk Allegra (Maggie Grace), Sylvia’s lesbian daughter, into joining the group—and they find their sixth member in Grigg (Hugh Dancy), a wealthy computer geek, who’s never read Austen before (and whom Jocelyn thinks could be just the guy to help Sylvia through her break-up). And as the six gather each month to discuss Austen’s books, they learn a little about themselves along the way.
As a Jane Austen fan (just for the record, I liked her before she was cool), I could have gone a couple of different ways with The Jane Austen Book Club. I could have loved it just because it talks about Jane Austen. Or I could have hated it because it reduces her to a Hollywood chick flick. But I’m going to go with Option C: I liked it because it was a cute, simple movie with likeable characters. I liked it because, for the first time in a very long time, I was able to take my seat in the theater and get so caught up in the story that I eventually became oblivious to my surroundings. I liked it because it made me go back to my office and pull my copy of Sense and Sensibility off the shelf.
The Jane Austen Book Club takes a few simple love stories and pulls them together in a perfectly neat and simple way. Of course, some of the conclusions are a bit too simple and a bit too easy, but that’s just the way it works with Jane Austen. She liked her endings to be neat. But, fortunately, the stories are interesting nonetheless—and you can’t help but love the women (and feel sorry for the one poor man who’s just trying to figure it all out).
Of course, if you don’t know a lot about Austen or her books, you probably won’t catch the subtle references along the way—but those are just subtleties. And you won’t really understand the brief book discussions, either—but many of those discussions are more about the characters than the books. So, in the end, you won’t miss all that much.
You don’t have to be a Jane Austen scholar to enjoy this light, refreshing film. But I guarantee that once it’s over, you’ll want to start a Jane Austen book club of your own.
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