Becoming Jane

Reviewers have been trotting out adjectives like "pleasant," "sweet," and "charming" to describe Becoming Jane; immediately after seeing it, I was thinking "cute" and "frothy."  Like most biopics about artistic types, the film cannot find a way to dramatize the actual creative process, so it turns to correspondences between art and life instead.  As a number of critics have already pointed out, Becoming Jane is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in biographical clothing--or would be, if there were any actual evidence for Jane's Thwarted Love Affair with a Worldly Young Irishman.  It's an alternate universe! So we've got Jane's very Bennet-ish parents (James Cromwell--now the go-to American for British roles, apparently--and Julie Walters), a Lady Catherine de Bourgh-type neighbor (Maggie Smith in high Maggie Smith mode), and so on.  Anne Hathaway does not add much sparkle in the title role, and Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Jane's sister Cassandra, might have been a better physical match for the real Jane.  Still, there is plenty of light comedy to enliven what might otherwise be a slightly draggy film. (The coda, with an older Jane briefly reunited with her Lost Love, probably could have been done without.) 

After watching the film, it struck me that biopics about the life of the author inadvertently contribute to the death of the author.  That is, such films frequently represent authorship as transcription or collage; the author's own unique contribution frequently gets lost in the mix.  On the one hand, Becoming Jane does want to argue in favor of the imagination, in the form of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.  Radcliffe's bestsellers derive, we are told, from an mental "landscape," a wild and eerie place pointedly not embodied in her reserved, restrained figure and rather shabby setting.  And Jane's own plots, we are also eventually told, will also be unreal, if in a different sense: although Jane initially rejects the comforts of poetic justice in Fielding's Tom Jones, the novel which is also the source of her sexual awakening (this is one of the more literate seduction techniques in recent memory, I must say), her experience of romantic loss teaches her the need for stories in which everyone gets their just rewards.  In that sense, the film detaches fiction from "real life."    Yet, on the other hand, the film adheres to the biopic's conventions for representing inspiration, and these conventions make fiction very much a direct product of the author's biography.  Jane even gets the first line of her novel from the unprepossessing Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox, of the omnipresent Fox acting clan).  Strictly speaking, there's nothing inaccurate about this convention; after all, Charlotte Bronte turned William Carus Wilson into Mr. Brocklehurst, Charles Dickens kept recycling his childhood experience of poverty, and so on.  But this turn to biography eventually becomes troubling, I think, when it confuses why the author might have been drawn to put such-and-such in a text with what such-and-such actually does there. 

Comments

[SEK]

[T]he film cannot find a way to dramatize the actual creative process...

George Eliot on Herbert Spencer, quoted today:

Spencer, Herbert, an original and profound philosophical writer, especially known by his great work XXX which gave a new impulse to psychology and has mainly contributed to the present advanced position of that science, compared with that which it had attained in the middle of the last century. The life of the philosopher, like that of the great Kant, offers little material for the narrator. Born in the year 1820 &c.

[Robert Nagle]

I'm not really addressing your excellent points, but I wanted to add that biopics of artists are a way for mediums of popular culture to make "archaic forms" palatable to mainstream audiences. Amadeus & Shakespeare in Love are the most successful examples that comes to mind, but both bend the truth quite a bit and seem a bit silly to those who know about the subject.

Still, these biopics are gateway drugs to the harder stuff.

I'm undecided about whether biopics verge on "literary reductionism" (making everything explainable by examining the biography) or have the effect of stressing the magical qualities of artistic inspiration. I guess it boils down to whether the audience wants to be flattered or entranced.