Becoming Jane (PG) *** (From Times Series)

Becoming Jane (PG) ***

9:20pm Wednesday 7th March 2007

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Dir: Julian Jarrold
With: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters

JULIAN Jarrold's attempt to reveal the living, loving woman inside a literary icon gets off to an audacious start. Jane Austen's parents are in bed discussing the need to marry off their daughters. The Reverend Austen, tiring of the subject, starts to get frisky. Night caps are knocked askew. There is slapping and tickling. For fie sir, what is this? Pride, prejudice and a little light porno?

Not quite. Becoming Jane takes the wispy strands of what is known about the author's brief acquaintance with young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy and weaves from them a film that instead of enraging Austenites will likely have them sighing with pleasure.

Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy play the star-crossed lovers. The casting of a young American as England's Jane ruffled a few blouses when it was announced. While Hathaway takes a while to get used to, that hair and those teeth being strictly 21st-century Hollywood, she so badly wants to succeed it seems cruel not to give her a chance.

The first sight of our bold boy McAvoy is in a whorehouse, swigging wine prior to a bout of bare-knuckle boxing. His uncle (the late Ian Richardson in typically first-class form) sends the young buck to the countryside in the hope the tedium will dampen his spirits.

Arriving at his first social engagement, an afternoon tea party, he is just in time to hear Miss Austen giving one of her readings. Lefroy is unimpressed and makes no attempt to hide it, yawning, scratching and looking heavenwards. Insult is added to visual injury when Austen hears him dismissing her "juvenile self-regard".

Given Austen is second only to Helen Mirren as the nation's number one love object, this is impudence of heroic proportions.

Lefroy slowly warms to Austen's quick mind and obvious talent. "Experience is vital," he advises, if she is ever to be the equal of a man as a writer. The only experience he has in mind for now is the reading of Tom Jones. All the sex in Becoming Jane happens by proxy, a sigh here, a bare-knuckle fight there, although there is a kiss that's PG in practice but 18 in intent.

This being Austen, everything must boil down to money and marrying well. Since neither Jane nor Lefroy have any, their relationship is doomed.

The screenplay by Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams, television writers by trade, gets its points across efficiently. The trouble with England's Jane is that so much has been said about her and her novels that it's difficult to make the subject seem fresh, and impossible to do so if tackled as a period piece.

Whatever bold intentions Jarrold had, his film ends up the usual parade of bonnets, carriages, balls and elaborate, faux-Austen dialogue of the kind the author would have struck from the page with a vigorous sweep of her pen.

Working from the biography by Jon Spence, Becoming Jane is only daring in that it suggests Austen's works sprang as much from personal experience as an innate genius for observing other people. It would be an insult if there was any malice, but there is none here.

There is one unforgivable act perpetrated, however. To reveal it would give too much away: let's just say it involves a man and a certain sentence. If this doesn't have Janeites picketing cinemas with Father Ted-inspired cries of "Down with this sort of thing," then ladies, you should be ashamed.

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