Whit Stillman (2016)

According to Wikipedia, there have so far been twenty English-language television adaptations of Jane Austen’s six novels.  (This total includes both one-off TV movies and serialisations.)  Pride and Prejudice tops the table with five; Emma and Persuasion are next with four; Sense and Sensibility has been done three times; Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey twice each.  Adaptations for cinema are relatively (and surprisingly) few.  Only two of the novels have been done more than once – there are three Pride and Prejudices and two Emmas, no feature films of either Northanger Abbey or Persuasion.   The use of Austen scenarios as the basis for stories transposed to different times, places or genres has, however, become a movie sub-industry in the last twenty years or so.  Examples include Clueless (1995), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Bride and Prejudice (2004), Material Girls (2006) and, earlier this year, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  In 2007, Becoming Jane tried to turn Austen’s own life into an Austen novel-on-screen.  When this film appeared, you could almost hear the barrel being scraped – sense the movie world’s frustration that Jane Austen failed to write more screenplays-to-be in the course of her rather short life.

But there are more.  Although she died, aged forty-one, before completing Sanditon[1], Austen left behind juvenilia that include the story Love and Freindship [sic] and the novella Lady Susan.  These are both epistolary in form.  Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is, in spite of its title, an adaptation of the latter; he makes some use of the letters that comprise the original Lady Susan to enrich his screenplay.  The Wikipedia entry on ‘Jane Austen in popular culture’ from which I’ve taken most of the information above[2] also includes, under the heading ‘Looser adaptations’, Stillman’s first feature film, Metropolitan (1990).  The suggestion that this is derived from Mansfield Park isn’t substantiated, however (nor is it mentioned in the separate Wikipedia page on Metropolitan).  Even so, the overwhelmingly favourable reviews of Love & Friendship reveal broad critical consensus that Whit Stillman is unusually well equipped to make a Jane Austen movie.  I’d previously seen only one of his films but I can’t disagree on the basis of the light, crisp touch he showed in Damsels in Distress – set in a somewhat rarefied world with its own moral and social code, and dominated by verbal exchanges between quick-witted young women.   In his interview in the June 2016 Sight & Sound, Stillman expresses an enthusiasm for Austen which he convinces you is genuine and strong.

When I first saw the trailer for Love & Friendship, I assumed – because of the prevailing performing style and I didn’t know the source material existed – that it was a Jane Austen spoof.  Even after seeing the whole film, I haven’t quite got the idea out of my mind.  (The satirical register of the opening legends on the screen, which summarise each of the dramatis personae in a single phrase, perhaps contributed to this.)  The cast’s dry, understated delivery is a welcome and an effective means of avoiding faux-Regency archness but also gives the line readings a distinctly modern sound.  In Bright Star, Jane Campion’s actors also sounded like twenty-first century people but this made their early nineteenth-century characters more immediately engaging and expressive.  The effect is different in a comedic film like Love & Friendship – not least because of our familiarity with cinema and television comedy period pieces whose humour depends largely on a disjuncture between the historical sets and costumes and the modernised characterisations.   But though the playing in Love & Friendship doesn’t, I think, bring the characters in the story closer to being people we actually recognise, it does succeed in making them more really believable within their own time and conventions.

The style of delivery that I’m trying to describe is especially pronounced in the performance of Kate Beckinsale, in the lead role of the unscrupulous adventuress Lady Susan Vernon.  She has so many lines there are times you feel Beckinsale needs more vocal colouring but her level acidity is a good counterpoint to Lady Susan’s amusingly intimidating costumes (by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh) and she’s undeniably the heartless heart of the piece.  Among the supporting parts, Tom Bennett’s interpretation of the brainless but appealingly wealthy Sir James Martin has been reasonably singled out for praise:  Bennett is very witty – it’s the icing on the cake that he makes Sir James not only ridiculous but genuinely likeable.   Another fine contribution, in a much smaller role but thanks to a similar fusion of comic skill and empathy with the character, comes from Conor McNeill, as an eager, scripturally erudite young curate.   Morfydd Clark is excellent as Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica.  Other particular assets in the cast include Emma Greenwell, Justin Edwards and Lochlann O’Mearáin.

Chloë Sevigny, although I found it relatively hard to make out what she was saying, has strong presence as Lady Susan’s American friend, Alicia.  Even Stephen Fry is bearable, as Alicia’s husband.  Fry’s acting is more conventional screen-Austen; the same is true, at a much more skilful level, of James Fleet’s and Jemma Redgrave’s – and this makes you aware of how well Stillman has orchestrated the performances.  The choice of familiar classical music on the soundtrack seems designed both to give us our bearings and to throw into relief the film’s distinctiveness.  I admire its stylistic wit and coherence more than I enjoyed watching Love & Friendship but Whit Stillman’s achievement in making a Jane Austen movie that stops short of being subversive yet feels fresh should not be underestimated.

27 May 2016

[1] Sanditon nevertheless spawned the 2013 TV series Welcome to Sanditon, set in a fictional Californian town.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen_in_popular_culture