Studio:

Theatrical: Miramax & HanWay Films

Video: Miramax Home Entertainment

 

Video:

Aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Feature film: 1080p

120 minutes

Supplements: 480i

 

Audio:

English 5.1 Uncompressed (48 kHz/24-bit)

English DD 5.1 Surround

Spanish DD 5.1 Surround

 

Subtitles:

Feature: English SDH, French, Spanish

Extras: English SDH

 

Extras

• Featurette: Discovering the Real Jane Austen

• Becoming Jane Pop-up Facts & Footnotes

• Deleted Scenes

 

Standard Blu-ray case

1 disc: 16 chapters

Release Date: February 12, 2008

 

Becoming Jane ~ Comment

There's a certain feminist revisionist quality that finds its way inevitably into films like the recent Pride & Prejudice with Keira Knightley that bugs me, as if Jane Austen's heroines weren't feminist enough for our taste. Becoming Jane is very much in this mode – perhaps all the more so since it owes no allegiance to a specific novel from two centuries ago.  The feminism in Shakespeare in Love, on the other hand, seemed to me to grow from the characters, not from a need to appease modern audiences.

 

 

 

From the outset, I was put off our mark by the suddenness of events: Jane's piano playing that wakes people out of bed and makes servants drop their trays; Jane's dramatic self-critical reaction to Lefroy's initial offhand snub of her writing talents and their subsequent getting into issues of gender roles as if they had been talking about the subject for days, and later, the dramatic way someone steps on Jane's foot at the dance.  Despite the care taken in the art direction, subtlety is not much in evidence here.

 

Perhaps for the very reason that I felt the protagonists forced down my throat, as it were, pretty much all the supporting characters were more interesting and more compelling to me than the two lovers.  More convincing still was the art direction and costumes, which convincingly catapulted me back to the days before the flush toilet.  Its very sense of reality seemed to work against the modernist attitude and behaviors of its heroine.

 

Becoming Jane ~ The Score Card

 

The Movie : 6

The events depicted, loosely based on Jane Austen's early life, preceded publication of her novels.  It offers two themes: that Jane was already a feminist snob (in the best sense, of course) and would refuse a suitor if it were only to satisfy the requirements of duty; and that she required a love affair to gain the necessary experience and understanding of love.  Rejecting the declarations of Lady Gresham's protégé – a "booby," as Jane (Anne Hathaway) so unsympathetically describes him -  and so is ripe for the opposite: the charms of a rogue. Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), for his part, falls predictably for the headstrong Jane.  However, he must first convince his uncle of Miss Austen's acceptability as a bride, for without his consent, Tom would be penniless and without prospects.  As the lovers sort out their predicament, the threads of plot and theme for Austen's Pride and Prejudice emerge.