There’ve been a lot of movies lately about the lives of authors and how they were influenced to write their most famous works. If things keep going he way they are now, pretty soon we’ll have Carrie Me Away, about what made Stephen King decide to write Carrie and then maybe Magical Me about the life of J.K. Rowling. In a way, it was inevitable that Anne Hathaway would play a famous English writer considering the name she has. All-in-all, she’s probably the one good thing about this otherwise tepid look at one of the most famous English writers of all time.



Becoming Jane is about the time in Jane Austen’s life when she put pad to paper and churned out the work that would be later named Pride and Prejudice. Hathaway plays Jane, an unconventional woman (for the time) that stays up nights working on her writing, tying long sequences of adjectives together in beautiful prose. She’s being courted by a local lord and forced into a match by her mother (Julie Walters) in order to guarantee financial security. But when a loveable rogue named Lefroy (James McAvoy) comes to the countryside from London, Anne begins to rethink her place in life and is inspired to write the novel that would make her famous.



First of all, and I can’t stress this enough, Hathaway is great, she really shines in the role and her English accent is pretty good save for one or two instances. She brings a lot of energy and really throws herself into the part, making you think completely that is Jane Austen. I wish the rest of the film was a match.



The story itself is pretty conventional though; brilliant writer defies parents/society in order to pursue true love and find their destiny away from the confines of their class/social status. And let’s face it: remove the “writer” tag and this is the second oldest story in the book. Not helping is that fact I found McAvoy fairly unengaging as a romantic lead. Then again so was Mr Darcy, the Pride character that Lefroy was supposedly the model for, but you’re rooting for Darcy and Elizabeth, I wanted Lefroy gone so we could get more stuff between Jane and the charmingly befuddled Mr. Wisley.



The whole story unfolds rather predictably and all the appropriate highlights are hit on their expected cues, including the bittersweet post-script. Of course, this makes the proceedings woefully drawn out as your waiting for things to get to their inevitable conclusion. This might be interesting for Austen fans, but they’ll know the story already. In other words, it’s all been done before.