I feel like Robin Swicord’s (Little Women) adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club is the type of film I should probably come down hard upon. It is thin and sometimes cloying, its six interlocking stories are not consistently interesting, the men (for the most part) are little more than one dimensional props and the syrup dripping from around the edges tends to get a little thick has events rocket towards their climax. It is, without question, obvious not altogether surprising, and anyone with half a brain is going to know exactly how it is all going to end barely a few minutes in.

Emily Blunt and Marc Blucas in Sony Pictures Classics' The Jane Austen Book Club

Be all that as it may, I liked the darn thing. It took me a little while, but as the film progressed (and even as every inch of me tried to fight against it) the women at its core wrapped me up inside their lives and actually made me care about the choices they were all going to make. I wanted to see happily single dog lover (and secret matchmaker) Jocelyn (Maria Bello) succumb to the erstwhile charms of beguiling young suitor (and sci-fi fanatic) Grigg (Hugh Dancy), needed prim French teacher Prudie (Emily Blunt) to flirt with taking a dangerous plunge with her sexy 18-year-old student Trey (Kevin Zegers) while still coming to the realization her sports obsessed husband Dean (Marc Blucas) really does lover her.

Their stories and the dramas surrounding their friends Bernadette (Kathy Baker), Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), her lesbian daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace) and cheating husband Daniel (Jimmy Smits) swept me up inside their pulpy romantic confines. Sure none of it is anything I haven’t seen before and doesn’t go anyplace I haven’t already been but for once in my life I’m just not going to be critical enough to care. Swicord’s screenplay manages to craft just enough beguiling magic to make me overlook many of the flaws, and by the time these women devoured Austen and her works I was just about ready to jump into the screen and join their book club myself.

That’s probably laying it on a little thick. There are some severe problems here, after all, not the least of which is that for all of the filmmaker’s gifts as a screenwriter she tends to wield a bit of a heavy hand as a director. Emotions aren’t so much inferred as they are hammered into submission, the picture moving from plot twist to plot twist with all the subtlety of a rubber glove slapping the viewer right in the face. Some characters I can’t help but wonder why they are even in the darn thing, a brief subplot featuring Lynn Redgrave so absurd it’s actually downright embarrassing.

Yet individual scenes and moments work beautifully. A scene in a labyrinthine used book store between Grigg and Prudie, a moment of quiet reading between Prudie and Dean, a subtle touch of the hand over a child’s hospital bed between Daniel and Sylvia, each one a single shot of blissful poetry making my hair stand on end. I found myself relating to these women, felt myself melding facets of my own life right up against their own, and by the time things were all said and done I really didn’t want to see them go. 

Is it all enough? In some ways, sure, while in many others not so much. Yet the good definitely outweighs the bad here, many of the actors (especially Bello, Blunt, Grace and Dancy) delivering expertly crafted portraits I couldn’t help but connect at least in some small part with. In the end, this movie is truly a bit of a fluffy fairy tale filled with unrealistic expectations and outcomes and really nothing more. But fairy tales, like sunny romances written by the titular author, have their time and they have their place, and for me The Jane Austen Book Club fits in both those places quite splendidly.

Film Rating:  êêê  (out of 4) 

Additional Links:

-  The Jane Austen Book Club Theatrical Trailer