Movie review: 'The Jane Austen Book Club'

3 stars (out of four)

Karen Joy Fowler’s best seller “The Jane Austen Book Club” makes the point that people see themselves in their favorite literature—“Each of us has a private Austen,” the book begins. But Robin Swicord’s lively film adaptation expands on that theme, making it into a running joke and a smart observation. Viewers don’t need any particular knowledge of Austen to follow along; when the film’s characters compare notes on her work, they’re talking first and foremost about themselves.

The titular club begins as a friendly distraction, designed to make sure dog breeder Jocelyn (Maria Bello) doesn’t “sit at home and brood” after the death of a favorite animal. Bustling social butterfly Bernadette (Kathy Baker) recruits high-school French teacher Prudie (Emily Blunt) from an Austen film screening, and enlists her old friend Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) and Sylvia’s thrill-seeking lesbian daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace) to join them in re-reading and discussing Austen’s novels.

But from the start, it’s clear that the books are just a subconscious means of expressing their prejudices, fears, and frustrations. Except for Bernadette, who serves as a chipper mascot and enabler, they’re all distressed and in need of the kind of unstinting personal support that only idealized, imaginary friends like their private Austens can provide. Sylvia’s husband Daniel is in love with someone else, though he self-servingly encourages Sylvia to think of divorce as “quitting while we’re ahead” after a so-far successful life together. Allegra’s girlfriend is a mercenary manipulator. Prim, neurotic Prudie is sick of her jockish husband and is fearfully pondering an affair with a student.

And Jocelyn is trying to figure out what to do with the club’s token man, whom she recruited as a rebound offering for Sylvia. Unfortunately for her, Grigg (Hugh Dancy) is an anomaly in chick-lit: a fantasy man with an actual personality. He’s rich, cute and inexplicably drawn to off-putting women—traits that would make him right at home in books like “The Nanny Diaries” or “The Devil Wears Prada”—but he’s also a closet geek, given to science-fiction obsessions, Star Wars paraphernalia, and petulance when treated like the accessory Jocelyn wants him to be. In short, he’s just as troubled as everyone else. And he’s smitten with perpetual spinster Jocelyn, who isn’t sure how to respond.

Swicord gives “The Jane Austen Book Club” a fairly pedestrian look, repeating the same visual notes time and again; every time the story moves forward, she mechanically returns to montages of the cast diligently reading their Austen. Her most creative visual touch is the film’s opening montage of modern inconveniences—metal detectors, traffic, dysfunctional machines—which stand in pointed contrast with the simple, old-fashioned pleasures of a good book. As a director, she seems capable, but neither ambitious nor daring.

But her script is an inspired expansion of Fowler’s book. It strips the sense of character out of Fowler’s long descriptions and internal monologues, and puts it all into dialogue that keeps the pace up and the energy flowing. It deftly takes advantage of her stars’ strong personalities, and puts a raucous cinematic sizzle into what was a more sedate affair on the page. Swicord recognizes the comic potential of her characters’ obliviousness, but she doesn’t laugh at them. Like Fowler, she uses their lack of self-awareness to let viewers into their heads.

She also takes advantage of their expressiveness, and the way it makes them more distinct on screen than they were on the page. Fowler’s book methodically visited everyone’s head sequentially and separately, because such a large cast tended to blur together on the page. On screen, Baker’s motherly warmth, Blunt’s brittle pretensions and Dancy’s puppy-dog eagerness all stand out, which lets Swicord simply throw them all together and let them talk out their issues like friends. The cast is tight and terrific, not missing a beat as they spin out their elaborate theories about what Austen meant. Swicord’s script isn’t flawless: it’s frequently too pat, particularly in the ludicrously tied-up ending. But overall, “The Jane Austen Book Club” is an admirable mix of heady and fluffy, the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that needn’t make filmgoers ashamed of what they wished for.