'Love and Friendship': A Jane Austen adaptation with teeth.

When you look at Jane Austen’s novels through the movies that have been adapted from them, Austen’s world seems frivolous and saccharine, like something out of a Hallmark movie, in which the romance has been bled out, neutered, tamed beyond any semblance of passion. Not all of the adaptations are guilty of this, but inevitably, all of them contribute to our view of Jane Austen as a “lady writer” concerned with only the most inconsequential matters. Real readers of Jane Austen, on the other hand, know better. They know that Jane Austen’s wit and acumen remain matchless, that her precision of language continues to surprise even the most perennial of readers. That’s why Love and Friendship (which is based on the novel Lady Susan) is such a breath of fresh air. It was directed and written by Whit Stillman, and if you’ve followed Stillman’s career, this match seems a long time coming.

I became a fan of Stillman several years ago when I watched Metropolitan (1990), a film about New York debutantes living in an age that has outgrown, or perhaps de-classed itself out of a need for such traditions. The characters in Metropolitan speak in complete sentences, voicing strong opinions about art, politics, culture, and the dynamics of their particularly alien (to most viewers) social structure. Sounds very Jane Austen. 

Love and Friendship concerns an opportunistic and devious woman named Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), who comes to visit the family of her late husband, ostensibly out of a desire to gratify his memory, but really because she’s in dire straights. Susan remarks to her teenage daughter, Frederica, “We don’t live; we visit.” Whatever she must do, Susan will do, to ensure a roof over her head and some level of comfort and respectability. What viewer can resist Susan’s ruthless opportunism, and the clever and skillful ways in which she ingratiates herself with various members of the household (particularly the kind-hearted and gullible young Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), who falls in love with her?) 

Love and Friendship is, finally, a Jane Austen adaptation with teeth. Stillman respects, indeed adores, Austen’s writing enough to adapt it honestly and faithfully. (I haven’t read Lady Susan, but I mean that Stillman gets the Austen spirit and humor and tone more than most, and remains true to it throughout the film.) There’s an early scene where DeCourcy’s parents are reading a letter from their daughter, who’s distraught that her brother is associating with Susan, a woman with a reputation. The elderly Mr. DeCourcy keeps paraphrasing the letter for his wife, whose eyes are strained from a cold, until his wife begs him to simply read it to her; but then he does so quite literally, naming every mark of punctuation with the dedication of a telegram. “Stop! My eyes have recovered,” she cries, “I can read it myself.”

Later, when Susan and her American confidant Alicia are walking, they are greeted by a gentleman who keeps trying to communicate with Susan. She rebuffs him as though he were propositioning her. “Did you know him?” Alicia asks. “Of course,” replies Lady Susan. “I would never speak that way to a stranger.”

Kate Beckinsale plays Susan with pluck and relish: She has a natural frothiness. She can be sweet as icing and cold as stone in the same breath. Chloe Sevigny, as the American Alicia, turns in an equally funny performance. Alicia herself is a devoted opportunist, and you have to admire both of these women, using the gifts they have to survive in a world that fabricates hypocrisies to exclude them. Their friendship acts as a kind of center for the movie: Susan continually narrates her latest successes and failures to Alicia, who serves as a willing accomplice whenever she can, but who must protect herself from her suspicious and imposing husband (Stephen Fry), who keeps threatening to send her back to the States. 

What’s perhaps most amusing and fascinating about this story is Susan’s own caddishness toward her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark). She wants to aid her daughter’s future, but never at a cost to her own designs on marriage and social-climbing. She even encourages her daughter’s marriage to a bumbling fool named Sir James (Tom Bennett), an awkward, foolish man whom Reginald describes as a peabrain. When in a discussion about the Ten Commandments, Sir James mistakenly refers to them as the Twelve Commandments. Reginald’s father corrects him: “I believe there were only ten.” “Oh wonderful,” James replies, quite sincerely asking, “Which two shall we leave off?”

The Commandments play a significant role in Love and Friendship. Susan invokes them at her convenience, mainly the fifth one, about honoring your parents, whenever she needs to manipulate her daughter into carrying out her own wishes. When Frederica asks a curate about this commandment, he provides his own interpretation: Our parents have cultivated a beautiful mansion for us, not a savage wilderness, and we must honor them for it. But it’s clear that the world of Love and Friendship is a savage wilderness indeed: a place where opportunity and survival are rewarded, if only you can use cunning and feminine wiles to achieve them.

With Emma Greenwell, James Fleet, Jemma Redgrave, Justin Edwards, and Jenn Murray. 

The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco (1998) is such a strange movie, a movie about how the night can take on a life of its own, and how that which is sexy at twelve midnight is pretty pathetic at twelve noon.  It has writer-director Whit Stillman's signature mock-intellectual dialogue (which served him so well in Metropolitan), and a terrific soundtrack (provided you like disco music), as well as one of the best long party scenes I've ever seen, taking up the first half hour of the movie and imbibing it with a kind of fluid magic.

The characters might as well be carbon copies of those in Metropolitan. One of the actors from that movie, Chris Eigeman, even plays a thinly-veiled variation on his character from that film, and newcomers Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale could be the two main girls from it, except with different hairdos. Sevigny is understated and smart but critical, and Beckinsale embodies a kind of cattiness as her observant and opinionated friend/roommate. Together they inhabit a New York nightclub and it becomes a sort of stage to enact the drama of yuppie romance and friendship.

I liked Last Days for the same reason I loved Metropolitan: The conversations, as in Metropolitan, were generally interesting, and so other-worldly in their quasi-Victorian-ness that they left me somewhat dumbfounded and fascinated. But there was also something a bit false about Last Days of Disco. The dialogue always seems to be teetering between refreshing and ridiculous. It is rather nice to hear people talking in complete sentences and using correct grammar, but when the owner of a nightclub comments on someone's wrong usage of the past perfect tense, something feels disingenuous.

Then again, director Stillman often seems like he's toying with his characters' intelligence in the first place. He lets them get puffed up on their own sophisticatedness and then watches them become caricatures, although he doesn't completely dehumanize them. It's a lot more subtle that that. They're somewhere between soap opera and sitcom, book smart and street smart, bold and terrified. And all of these contradictions are masked by a veneer of success and confidence that we the audience can generally see through. 

The real problem with Last Days is that everything about the film feels too familiar, as if Stillman were simply unable to do anything but recycle old ideas. I think it's very likely he wanted to explore the same ideas in a slightly different context. He's too interested in these types of people--educated, privileged upper-class sophisticates--not to use them in his films. This at least makes them interesting for us, up to a point, but their intelligence often morphs into myopia, and this turns them into shallow, unappealing characters toward the end of the film.

And then of course, the fact that at some point this film is acknowledging a kind of reverence for the disco era is laughable, especially at the end when passengers on the subway begin dancing to "Love Train." Was that really such a great way to end a movie that's so self-consciously clever? It's difficult to know if the film is trying to be hip, ironic, or subversive. I think perhaps it's a combination of all three. The cast includes a lot of promising young actors including Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals, Matt Ross, Tara Subkoff, and David Thornton. 114 min. ★★½

Metropolitan

In Metropolitan (1990), Tom Townsend, who's just finished his first semester at Princeton, unexpectedly enters into the inner-circle of a group of upper-class New York college students during debutante season. It's like a preppie Breakfast Club only everyone's too intellectual to wallow in self-pity. Most of the action takes place in one of the adolescent's homes, where the group stays up late into the night drinking, talking, and occasionally playing Bridge or some other game. They're socialites in training. It would be pretentious if it wasn't so funny and so earnest.

The writer-director Whit Stillman pulls off something impressive: he creates a believable, sympathetic, even inviting, world comprised of somewhat stuck-up, educated young people who are endearing in spite of themselves. They talk about philosophy and economics but they also gossip, and they're acutely aware of their social world. They're also naive, but in their precocious over-analyzing they manage to find at least some degree of acceptance that, though they think they know everything, they may also be wrong about some things.

The performances by the fresh-faced cast are mostly good. This is an extremely talky movie, one that almost plays like a filmed stage production. It's a movie about ideas and social relationships, and while Stillman isn't totally ignorant of or indifferent to the cinematic elements of his movie, he's far more attuned to the dialogic aspects. We're immersed in this inner-circle like a fly on the wall as the social dramas play out: the scathing remarks, the incisive criticisms, the hopeful longings for romance and success, the cynical worries of the future: it's all wrapped up in a peculiar fabric of conversation. You're never even sure how much these people like each other.

At times they seem to have cut each other to pieces, and then moments later it's as though nothing's happened, and they're chasing after some other thread of conversation. It's a fascinating movie; not perfect, but never boring, and totally unpredictable. I was charmed by it in a way I haven't been in a long time.

The cast includes: Edward Clements as Tom, the newcomer who has a lot of "big" ideas about economics, culture, and philosophy, but is also still a little gauche when it comes to girls; Carolyn Farina as Audrey, the bookish girl who's never really been in love before; Chris Eigeman (a stand-out performance), as Nick, the guy who pisses everyone off with his cynical honesty and harsh criticisms of one and all, but is also somehow likable in spite of himself; Taylor Nichols (who made me think of Crispin Glover) as Charlie, the nerdy ideologue who's in love with Audrey but can't get up the nerve to tell her, and resents Tom because Audrey has a crush on him; and Allison Parisi (who, with her raven-like hair and confident, imposing features resembles a young Kirstie Alley), the most "grown-up" acting of the girls; she exudes maternal qualities but is indifferent toward the other girls at the same time. Also starring: Isabel Gillies, Bryan Leder, Will Kempe, and Ellia Thompson. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 98 min. ★★★½