Jane Addiction Part 4 - Miss Austen Regrets

Welcome to my 10 week critique of films based on the works of Jane Austen. I will review each installment of PBS's "Masterpiece: The Complete Jane Austen" and also take a look at other adaptations of the same novel. Enjoy!

Note: Since the following film is a biopic and not an Austen adaptation, I will be reviewing it alone. Alas, I have not seen the 2007 biopic Becoming Jane (due out on dvd February 12th) and am unable to make a comparison.

Miss Austen Regrets
Synopsis: Nearing age forty, popular novelist Jane is still a very single Miss Austen. Though an old maid by definition, she is flirtatious and funny and finds endless amusement in playfully mocking her peers - much to the glee of her impressionable young niece, Fanny. But Jane is at odds with other family members. Her mother resents her for never marrying. Her brothers are embarrassed to have a wage-earning sister. These rifts deepen when Jane convinces Fanny to refuse a stuffy minister's marriage proposal, thereby placing her niece in the same shaky financial straits that she, herself, faces daily. Despite her family's palpable anger and Fanny's mounting bitterness, Jane is nevertheless steadfast in her devotion to writing, but when health problems arise she begins taking account of her past choices.

Director Jeremy Lovering's Miss Austen Regrets is brimming with cinematic and narrative delights, not the least of which is the title, a play on Cole Porter's wonderfully macabre melody "Miss Otis Regrets". But instead of detailing the demise of a woman spurned, screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes tells the story of a woman who spurns, for a number of fascinating reasons. This characterization of Jane the Heartbreaker is expertly carried by the lovely Olivia Williams, who may be best known as Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman's shared love interest in Rushmore. Williams's Jane is exactly what Austen fans want her to be - beautiful, clever, sarcastic, and singular.

And yet she remained inexplicably single. Little is known about Austen's life, especially since most of her letters were burned upon her death. The well-know fact that she didn't marry is a puzzle to those of us readers who see ourselves in her thoughtful tales of love and marriage. How could she know so much about the things she never experienced?

As this version has it, Jane is very familiar with yearnings of the heart. She's entertained advances from more than one suitor and she has even been in love. Her stated claim for never getting hitched is that she has never met a man rich enough for her taste. This is as shocking to Fanny as it is to the viewer. "But all of your heroines married for love and not money!" she insists, to which her father replies, "If you think that's what her books say, perhaps you should read them again." Certainly, all of Jane's heroines wed for love, but most of them also marry into greater wealth (those who don't either come from money or find ancillary support in a sibling's more fruitful marriage). Even in Austen's world, where the virtuous seem to always find true love, marital bliss cannot be had without an ample income.

But Jane herself is no mere fortune hunter. She has at least as much to lose in betrothal as she could ever possibly gain, and the illustration of this quagmire is where Miss Austen Regrets gets really brilliant. It is reminiscent of Elizabeth I, in which Helen Mirren portrays Englands other most famous virgin as a painfully passionate woman who must forgo matrimony to maintain her power. For Jane, her power is in her ability to completely own the time and space she needs to write. The filmmakers capture the sanctity of this time and space in one perfect shot, in which we see Jane's scrawling pen abruptly rise from the parchment at the sound of a servant bustling through the room, hang in midair, and just as swiftly continue writing once the servant has leaves. These artful details elucidate the subtly tragic irony behind this woman's wordy gift of wit.

Miss Austen Regrets will be a bonus feature on the 2008 Sense and Sensibility dvd, to be released on April 8. But if I were you, I would figure out when my local PBS affiliate is rerunning it and watch it as soon as I can.