The Jane Austen Book Club
My motives for watching movies frequently are not high-minded. I rented “The Jane Austen Book Club” because I am obsessed with Emily Blunt, and it’s been too long since I’ve seen her in a significant role. (Beyond revealing that she has great legs, the reliably oblivious Mike Nichols wasted her in “Charlie Wilson’s War.”) Also, my friend Violet Glaze put “Book Club” on her 10 best list for 2007, although she admitted the pick was indefensible. Often the admittedly indefensible pick is the most entertaining movie on the list.
I guess, then, given those expectations, I was disappointed on both scores. I can’t figure out what Violet was thinking, exactly — the movie is fluff, beautifully acted and professionally assembled but entirely conventional and dull — and Blunt is mostly muzzled. She has one good scene, when her prudish high school French teacher (named Prudie, in case you forget) shares a smooch in a car with a dreamboat student. Otherwise, she’s asked to perform against her nature: to repress, to obfuscate, to deny. In “My Summer of Love,” her best work to date, she’s seductive, uninhibited and mesmerizing. She looks like she possesses sought-after secrets; you want to follow her anywhere. Blunt is gorgeous, but not blandly so; like many who photograph well, there’s something slightly “off” about her. Are her eyes too far apart? Is her nose too pointy, her chin too rounded, her mouth too wide? Invariably, the answer is no, but her beauty still defies convention. It also makes her versatile. She geeks out convincingly in “The Jane Austen Book Club,” with downcast eyes, severe bob hairdo and frumpy wardobe. But director and screenwriter Robin Swicord zeroes in on Prudie’s inhibitions, not her potential. The scene in the car is the only time Blunt cuts loose. Swicord draws strained parallels to Austen’s “Persuasion” as Prudie resists temptation and instead tries to salvage her marriage to her horse’s ass of a husband (Marc Blucas). You shouldn’t be rooting for a high school teacher to sleep with a student, but when the only dramatized alternative is so unappealing, it’s hard not to. Thanks to Blunt, we empathize with Prudie, but at the end — thanks to Swicord — we just feel sorry for her. She lacks imagination, and so does the movie.
Similar fates await most of the characters; the only one who refuses to compromise is Kathy Baker’s memorably daft Bernadette. Baker is superb as a woman comfortable with her eccentricities. Ultimately she snags her sixth husband, a dreamy Latino, but there’s little doubt she’d be sanguine no matter her marital status. Maria Bello and Amy Brenneman are excellent as well, but their stories gasp for inspiration. (One is a control freak who can’t admit she’s interested in a younger man; the other searches for an excuse to forgive her straying husband.) Even the lesbian in the club (Maggie Grace) finds a conventionally suitable mate, an Asian doctor (what a tiresome cliché). There are some lively scenes in “The Jane Austen Book Club,” but ultimately it amounts to little more than comfort food for conformist romantics.