The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)
Directed by Robin Swicord
Six Californians start a club to discuss the works of Jane Austen. As they delve into Austen's literature, the club members find themselves dealing with life experiences that parallel the themes of the books they are reading.
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Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, from her own screenplay, based on the eponymous novel by Karen Joy Fowler, succeeds only partially and only intermittently in establishing connections between six contemporary central Californian members of a Jane Austen book club and the Regency England characters in Austen’s six novels, which, in case you’ve forgotten, are Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.
The setting is Sacramento, where five women and one man meet to discuss Jane Austen's novels while their lives come together and pull apart in ways that seem lifted from the pages of "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice," et al.
Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, from her own screenplay, based on the eponymous novel by Karen Joy Fowler, succeeds only partially and only intermittently in establishing connections between six contemporary central Californian members of a Jane Austen book club and the Regency England characters in Austen’s six novels, which, in case you’ve forgotten, are Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.
The setting is Sacramento, where five women and one man meet to discuss Jane Austen's novels while their lives come together and pull apart in ways that seem lifted from the pages of "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice," et al.
Jocelyn (Maria Bello, "A History of Violence," "World Trade Center") is a determinedly single Rhodesian Ridgeback breeder who impulsively invites Grigg (Hugh Dancy, "Ella Enchanted," "Evening"), a stranger who mistakes her for a hotel 'Buffy' conventioneer, to join their club to extend his literary knowledge beyond sci-fi.
A bad sign when the only female in the creative process is Swicord, who, by working as a Mata Hari, as it were, as the woman behind The Jane Austen Book Club and Memoirs of a Geisha , has arguably done more harm to her gender than Michael Bay.
"The Jane Austen Book Club," adapted from Karen Joy Fowler's 2004 bestseller by screenwriter and first-time director Robin Swicord ("Practical Magic"), transfers that spirit to today's hectic world of cell phones, spinning classes and supermarket parking-lot gridlock.
I don’t know if that’s down to director Robin Swicord, making her feature-film debut here: she wrote the scripts for such icky, Hollywoodized depictions of womanhood as Memoirs of a Geisha and Practical Magic , and adapted this script from the novel by Karen Joy Fowler , or if this is a flaw in the novel itself.