The Jane Austen Book Club
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 8/10
My expectations for The Jane Austen Book Club were more than met, despite the completely unbelievable premise that all people will adore and bond over Jane Austen’s works. The story is flat-out, completely a woman’s fantasy world. It is, frankly, mental pornography.
In a number of really strange ways, this movie reminded me of The Breakfast Club because of its caricatures of personality and the way those characters try to rebel against those stereotypes by passing along behaviors as if the meeting was some sort of white elephant “secret santa” exchange. But The Breakfast Club was one of my favorite movies from the 1980s just because it admitted that there were other kinds of people beyond the popular types, The Jane Austen Book Club manages to talk about people who seem real.
Aside from the bizarre and unbelievable premise, the movie was surprisingly realistic-seeming in how the characters were portrayed. I like movies that talk about older people, where things are funny because they’re funny, not just because someone thinks there needs to be a joke there. I loved the scene where the man from the divorced couple shows up at his ex-wife’s house (their formerly shared home) and tries to mow her lawn. That was fundamentally funny to me. Jimmy Smits was really excellent as the ex-husband who gets a clue.
The lesbian daughter was interesting, but didn’t seem real. Her relationships did though.
Their friend who raises dogs and set them all up together, that was weird. And the way she constantly resists the guy who is perfect for her, well, Emma is my least favorite Austen book and that character got Emma in my nose like overly chlorinated pool water.
The man she brings, the quintessential Californian tech geek. I loved that stereotype. I was surprised they managed to portray it well since this was clearly a Hollywood movie and it was set in Sacramento— and Hollywood is never kind to geeks. He was just always a comic relief and seemed sort of conscious of his role in the group. I thought he was really ill-served by getting the Emma-like woman.
The French teacher who’s never been to France and whose husband has forgotten to try to compromise to her wishes because he can’t be an intellectual— he actively tries to hurt her feelings because he feels inadequate. That was really a neat person to bring in as the loner who hadn’t been part of the group before. I didn’t like how because the husband is forced to read a single page of Persuasion, he falls in love with Austen and thereby his wife. What?
My favorite part of this was how the older woman who has been around the block but still knows how to sprint for the goal found the French teacher woman when she was waiting in a queue for the Mansfield Park movie. I really adored how that relationship was built in subtle gestures and interactions. It seemed like such a beautiful friendship.
There was a lot of really nice stuff in this movie. Really nice stuff. The ham-fisted forcing people to line up with Austen main characters just sucked. The way that “Jane Austen makes everything better!” attitude was spoonfed was repulsive. And the whole fantastic premise bothered me. But those are things I could suspend disbelief over. I knew the movie was going to have those things and it surpassed them. But in terms of my enjoyment, they might as well have made the movie about people who all have red hair, or all like trumpet-jazz, or who wish Thai restaurants didn’t have so many mirrors plastered all over everything.
