Jane Austen is arguably one of the most fascinating authors of all time. While some of her most famous novels have been adapted for the screen, the time has come for the author herself to take center stage. Aside from Becoming Jane, a film that speculates on the novelist's own romantic tale which inspired her most popular books, there is a new film that promotes her books and at the same time features stories about love, romance, and relationships...

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What's the Movie About: Present day central California may be far removed from Regency England, but some things never change. We’re still every bit as preoccupied with the complexities of marriage, friendship, romantic entanglements, position, and social manners and mores asJane Austen was at the turn of the 1800s. THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB reveals the lives of an ensemble of present-day friends through the witty prism of their literary heroine. Six book club members, six Austen books, six interwoven story lines over six months in the busy modern setting of Sacramento, where city and suburban sprawl meet natural beauty.

While the contemporary stories never slavishly parallel the Austen plots, the six characters find echoes, predictions, warnings and wisdom about their own trajectories within Austen’s beloved narratives.

The members of the Jane Austen Book Club are:

BERNADETTE (Kathy Baker), whose life history is a paradox: how could this warm, wise, earthy free spirit possibly have been married six times? Now mid-50s and solo, Bernadette is a supportive friend to all and an island of calm amid the more turbulent lives around her. It’s Bernadette’s idea to convene her friends in an “All-Austen-All-The-Time” book club, because who better than Jane Austen to cure what ails the world? Once in a while, though, her book club remarks betray a wistful hope that love and romance are not completely behind her.

As ready as Bernadette has been to repeatedly take the marital plunge, her friend JOCELYN (Maria Bello) has stayed well out of the romantic fray. She declares that she’s never been in love—except, perhaps, with her champion Rhodesian Ridgeback, Pridey, faithful companion and sire of the noble line of dogs she breeds on her small ranch in the country. When Pridey dies, Jocelyn is engulfed in grief and her friends agree that she needs a distraction. But Jocelyn is far from fragile: gorgeous, confident, energetic, and bossy, she’s the engine that drives the book club.

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SYLVIA (Amy Brenneman) is Jocelyn’s lifelong friend; they even dated the same guy back in high school. DANIEL (Jimmy Smits) ended up married to Sylvia for over 25 years and they have three children. But when Daniel, a public-affairs lawyer, breaks the news to Sylvia that he has fallen in love with another woman, Sylvia is devastated. She was completely unaware of any discontent in their marriage. Daniel seeks renewal, a fresh new relationship to replace one gone stale with time and familiarity. Sylvia and Daniel’s daughter, ALLEGRA (Maggie Grace), 20ish, initially joins the book club just to support her mom; at loose ends romantically and professionally, Allegra has moved back into the family home to keep Sylvia company. Pretty, sporty, and easy-going on the surface, in matters of love Allegra is prone to passions and drama—themes to delve into in her Austen readings and discussions. She’s comfortably open about her sexuality (she’s gay), but hides from her mother that she’s into extreme sports (she skydives, kayaks, and rock climbs).

Quite the opposite of easy-going is PRUDIE (Emily Blunt), whose neuroses are perilously close to the surface. A young high school French teacher who’s never been to France, Prudie is newly married to DEAN (Marc Blucas), who has just cancelled their much-anticipated trip to Paris because of a business conflict. Dean is good-looking and loving, but his Joe Average sports-buff persona is an apparent mismatch for Prudie’s sharp intellect and emotional neediness. That neediness leads back to Prudie’s mother SKY (Lynn Redgrave), a relentlessly irresponsible aging hippie pothead. All this makes Prudie vulnerable to a most inappropriate infatuation with flirtatious high-school senior TREY (Kevin Zegers), who flusters Prudie with his bad-boy attentions. When Bernadette meets Prudie by chance, she spots her fragility, takes her under her mother hen wing, and invites her to join the Jane Austen Book Club.

The sixth member of the Jane Austen Book Club—and the only male—is GRIGG (Hugh Dancy), a geeky-cute techy in his early 30s whom Jocelyn meets in an elevator when her dog breeders’ convention shares a hotel with his sci-fi fan convention. Jocelyn eyes Grigg as a potential younger man diversion for Sylvia, but she’s oblivious to the obvious: that Grigg’s interest is focused on Jocelyn herself. He’s just too nice and self-effacing to make much fuss about it. Each month, the Jane Austen Book Club meets to discuss one of Austen’s novels, at Jocelyn’s pretty old farmhouse, or Sylvia’s comfortable family home in town, or Grigg’s spanking-new suburban tract house that’s surprisingly full of personality on the inside. The book club even squeezes into a Starbuck’s and a hospital room, and enjoys a beach outing in honor of an Austen seaside setting. Austen is the thread that runs through their interconnected lives, as the book club members play out their own stories: the dissolution of Sylvia’s settled, married life, and the reinvention of a new Sylvia. The daredevil Allegra who lacks caution in sports and love. The yoga-centered Bernadette, seemingly content to look after everybody else’s emotional well-being. Will Prudie figure out how to be a married grown-up, or will she chuck it all for an illicit fling? And will Jocelyn ever get over her literary snobbishness and read the Ursula LeGuin sci-fi classics that Grigg keeps urging her to try? As always in Austen, marriage, friendship, and finding one’s rightful place in the world are the things that really matter.

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Plots and Parallels: the Novels and the Book Club

Like a 21st century version of a Jane Austen novel, the six members of the Jane Austen Book Club live through romantic hopes and disappointments, the consolations and misunderstandings of friendship, and the infinite complications of life as social beings in a complex community. The book club members need look no further than their monthly reading and discussions to find parallels with their own lives. Sylvia, in the midst of a divorce, has the misfortune of hosting and leading the Mansfield Park discussion; the novel is replete with dissolving alliances, romantic disappointment, marital pitfalls, and adultery. As Jocelyn says when Sylvia breaks down in tears during the book club discussion, “reading Jane Austen is a freaking minefield.” Jocelyn herself has an Austen counterpart: the title character of Emma is lovely, rich, vivacious, and a tirelessly meddling matchmaker who thinks she knows what everybody else needs but is foolishly blind when it comes to herself. Willfully ignoring Grigg’s interest in her, Jocelyn pushes him at Sylvia, who is too busy mourning her marital breakup to notice.

Northanger Abbey, in which the heroine is much captivated by spooky tales of Gothic melodrama, is Grigg’s novel to host for the book club. For fun, he bedecks his suburban-bland house with Halloween-style decorations, but real Gothic melodrama intrudes when the death of a character is revealed. Ironically, the book club’s Pride and Prejudice discussion is the most fraught with heartache and anxiety. Although Pride and Prejudice is Austen’s most romantic novel, it’s laced with animosity and misunderstanding among lovers, and portrays the terrible strain of formal-dress soirees with deadly, witty accuracy. The black-tie dinner dance that the book club attends is every bit as emotionally charged as the husband-hunting dances in the novel, and Grigg and Jocelyn bicker as poisonously as Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. Daughters suffer through their relationships with mothers and fathers as painfully in the present-day book club as they do in the book.

Sense and Sensibility, in which mismatched engagements hamper the romantic hopes of two impoverished sisters, gives the book club members a backdrop to thrash out their discordant perspectives and attitudes. But it’s Persuasion, the last of the book club discussions that resolves the various stories: it’s about a couple who, years before, parted bitterly, but find their way back to reconciliation and love after much hesitation and misunderstanding. In its theme of second chances, it’s a keystone for Prudie and Dean, and for Sylvia and Daniel. And in its theme of gambling on love, it inspires Jocelyn, Grigg, Allegra, and Bernadette, each on their own way.

The book club’s final romantic pairings have a satisfying resolution and rightness—just as marriage and happy endings always have the last word in Austen’s novels.

[ Official Movie Site ]

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