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Confident And Assured, 'Love & Friendship' Strikes All The Right Austen Notes

Ross McDonnell
/
courtesy of Amazon Studios, Roadside Attractions
Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in Whit Stillman's 'Love & Friendship'

Whit Stillman was born to make a Jane Austen film. His godfather was the famous sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, whose book The Protestant Establishment brought us the acronym WASP, for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Stillman grew up in that world; he knows about social class and how intricate ganglia of manners work in society.

Stillman made his first film, Metropolitan, in 1990. It takes place among foundering upper class prep school kids in New York during the winter debutante season. It caught people by surprise because nobody was making films about such beings at the time. Most of Metropolitan visits these young people in their absent parents' New York apartments late at night after the parties. Overwhelmed by angst, they dissect the evening's events and who said what to whom. They dwell on the minutia of their lives because they're trapped in antiquated traditions. It's a sometimes funny, always awkward picture about a backwater of human life.

Love & Friendship is only Whitman's third feature since Metropolitan, but it looks like whatever his struggles have been, he's found resolution. Love & Friendship feels like it knows itself and knows where it's going from minute one. It's funny and nasty and satiric, and completely in control of itself.

The film comes from Lady Susan, an early, often overlooked short novel by Jane Austen. Its characters are less subtle than in most of Austen's stories – she's still finding her voice. One character is full of self-serving judgments, another unbelievably ignorant. The dialogue is more blunt than in the later novels.

Stillman, who also wrote the script for the movie, keeps the story in Austen's time – the early 19th century – revels in the twinkle of satire. For all the period reconstruction and the heavyweight costumes, Love & Friendship feels light and buoyant. The picture may make you think of Clueless, the 1995 re-working of Austen's Emma.

When Sir James Martin (Tom Bennet) blathers about the twelve commandments, it's funny, but it's funnier to see how the people around him, never dropping their affected good manners, try to correct him. Actually, the Biblical Ten Commandments come up a few times. Lady Susan Vernon, played by a marvelously well-tuned Kate Beckinsale, makes a neat distinction between the "shalls" and the "shall-nots." There's some discussion with the earnest vicar, who looks like he's maybe ten years old, about whether "Honor thy father and thy mother" is number four or five on the list. It may be besides the point that some of the characters take the commandments to be more in the way of suggestions.

Stillman is like a fish fully in the water. He takes Jane Austen's language and gives it yet another turn into genuine malice at times, but malice camouflaged with those manners just a step or two below aristocracy. It's a kind of camouflage that simultaneously reveals what it tries to hide.

Like most Jane Austen writing, Love & Friendship is still about finding suitable marriages, and the financial stability that people hope will come from proper alliances, but the cracks in the armor are less well-patched than in other stories and films.

If you've seen MetropolitanLove & Friendship looks as if Stillman has finally completed that project. Where Metropolitan was stilted and clearly underfunded, Love & Friendship looks lush and self-assured. Stillman's colors are lively; he holds the camera steady on characters who are quite clearly not in control of themselves, which makes the film funnier, more satirical, deeper and richer than Metropolitan.

Parody has to be the thing it parodies, so Love & Friendship is wonderfully costumed and arranged. It satisfies the celebration of surface that viewers love in filmed Austen stories – costume, nearly-elegant settings, clipped English accents – but also undercuts those things. The world here looks great, but the more you listen to Lady Susan, her various suitors, those she's wronged and those who remain clueless, the less you want to live there.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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