Saw it last night with my wife, a huge Austen fan, and we both liked it. Fine cast (Kate Beckinsale largely carries the movie, and her Lady Susan is delightfully amoral and scheming), crackling dialogue, beautiful cinematography. The brief written introductions when each character is introduced were a nice touch. The ending seemed a bit abrupt, though, and we would like to’ve seen much more of Stephen Fry.
I also wish the title had been in keeping with the alliterative precedent of Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility. Maybe… Love & Labours? Cunning & Courtship? Manners & Matrimony?
I saw this the other day and enjoyed it a lot. It’s been long enough since I read Lady Susan (the Austen novella the movie is based on) that I don’t remember every detail, but from what I do remember the movie seemed pretty faithful. The general plot is the same, and much of the dialogue (including many of Lady Susan’s best lines) is Austen’s. The ending is a bit different, but mostly in that it makes explicit things you’d have to infer from the novella.
The novella is told in an epistolary format, which works fine in print but isn’t very cinematic, so most of the letter writing was replaced by scenes of the characters talking. I thought this was handled quite well, and the movie did preserve scenes where the fact that communication was taking place via letter was important to the plot. IIRC Lady Susan’s unpaid companion was not in the novella at all, and was presumably invented to give her someone to talk to when she couldn’t plausibly be with her friend Alicia Johnson. But this didn’t seem too clumsy as it helped to establish that Lady Susan was happy to take advantage of others and that weaker/less intelligent people were often all too happy to let her.
My only criticisms were basically the same as yours. I thought the movie felt a bit rushed in parts and that it would have improved the pacing if it had been just a few minutes longer, and it seemed like a waste of Stephen Fry to have him in such a tiny role. Considering that Lord Manwaring was crucial to the plot it also seemed strange that he was barely seen and IIRC didn’t even speak. Chloe Sevigny also seemed miscast. I’ve liked her fine in other things but she was was kinda “meh” here, although it was probably a thankless role for any actress. Mrs. Johnson is really just in the story to give Lady Susan a like-minded friend and co-conspirator.
I wasn’t crazy about the title, either. “Love & Freindship” [sic] is actually the title of a story Austen wrote as a teenager. It’s a goofy parody of the romantic novels popular at the time, and really has nothing to do with Lady Susan.
Yeah, that confused me when I heard about this–Lady Susan is a completely different story from Love & Freindship. Lady Susan does not run mad as often as she chuses. I thought that it would be some odd kind of mashup of the two plots.
I was actually a bit disappointed when I realized that Love & Friendship the movie wasn’t an adaptation of “Love & Freindship” the story, because that could have been a lot of fun – although it would have needed to be fleshed out quite a bit to make a feature-length film.
I don’t believe there’s any reference to her being an American in the novella (I just started re-reading it), so someone presumably wanted an American in the cast.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any American characters in any of Austen’s works.
The actor who played the nincompoop (“a bit of a rattle”) second husband of Lady Susan was outstanding. Very funny. Hope he gets an Oscar nomination, at least.
His name is Tom Bennett and I’d never seen him in anything before, although looking at his IMDb page he seems to have done a lot of British television. I thought he was very good as well, as was the screenwriter, because Austen didn’t give Sir James Martin any dialogue.
Sir James is described by Austen as a “rattle” and a genial but arrogant dope who repeats himself and laughs too much at his own remarks. But the specifics of what he said and how he acted must all have been invented by the writer and actor, and they really made the most of this character. His lines probably would have been pretty funny if performed by any competent actor, but Bennett’s delivery was hilarious.
I’m not sure if the sound was off in our theater - the background music sounded fine, so I don’t think so - but throughout the movie it sounded like they had hidden the microphone off the side of the screen and not bothered to call the actors back to re-dub their lines. All the dialogue was just a bit silent and muted, particularly in comparison to the music track.
So that was annoying.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the film. It started pretty slow and seemed like it was going to be rather gruelling, but about 15 minutes in started to pick up pace, and then (yes) the nincompoop showed up and really livened it up.
I haven’t read the book, but it was pretty apparent where they had simply cut out sections from the book, and suddenly an amount of time has passed. But, it didn’t feel like anything had been lost by it.
It all ends just a little too cleanly, I felt. There’s a whole load of scheming and being nasty, and then suddenly Susan is like, “Oh, yeah, I should just reverse course.” She does so, and the movie ends happily with all resolved. I’d have liked to see something that shows her making that mental transition from “My daughter shall do the nefarious for the family, like I would.” To, “Oh, I’ll just do it and let her take the nicer man.” Instead, there’s a scant mention that she could do something like this, and then the next scene, everything’s been resolved.
So, overall, not a perfect film. But quite enjoyable, particularly if you’re not going into it with expectations of greatness.
Some people have suggested that the reason that Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale were cast as friends in this film was because they played friends in the 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco which was also written and directed by Whit Stillman. In that film, Beckinsale was also the conniving one and Sevigny was the naïve one. Since The Last Days of Disco, Stillman has only directed one film and one TV pilot. You should see Stillman’s first three films (Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco) to see how this resembles them.
We saw this last night. Given the rating at Rotten Tomatoes, we expected better.
One problem is “getting into” the accents. By the time you adjust, 20+ minutes of the film have gone by. So, virtually no humor perceived in the first part, lots more as the movie went on.
It was the arrival of Sir James that made things somewhat interesting. After a bit, the general stupidity of most of the men became clearer as a theme.
I’d rate it more like a 2 stars out of 4 movie. Okayish, but wished we had seen something better.
I just finished re-reading the novella, and nothing of significance was cut. It’s only about 70 pages long, so there’s not really anything to cut. The movie actually expanded upon the novella quite a bit.
The feeling that things were left out was probably due to the pacing of the movie, which seemed a bit off to me as well. I think even just having a few more establishing shots would have made it seem less rushed.
I actually thought it was a bit too obviously foreshadowed that Lady Susan would wind up marrying Sir James, when in the novella this is more of a surprise ending. But in neither version does Lady Susan marry him in order to let Fredericka off the hook. Sir James is a rich idiot, so while Lady Susan finds him far less attractive than Reginald, she’s not going to have to wait for him to inherit and it’s going to be a whole lot easier to carry on affairs under his nose. The movie even makes her pregnant with Lord Manwaring’s child, which means she had to marry someone in a hurry.
Lady Susan didn’t particularly want her daughter to marry Reginald, and probably didn’t believe Fredericka had much chance of winning his affections anyway when she agreed to let her go live with her aunt and uncle. She did want Fredericka off her hands though, and Reginald being “nicer” in the sense of more moral was actually a major point against him for Lady Susan. Even before he learned of her affair with Lord Manwaring, she’d realized that he wasn’t gullible enough to easily hoodwink for years of marriage and wasn’t (yet) rich enough to make it worth the effort.
The point of the ending as I see it is that Fredericka’s virtue is rewarded, but that Lady Susan’s scheming is also rewarded. Her plans didn’t work out exactly the way she’d originally intended, but she basically got what she wanted and is probably actually happier than if she’d married Reginald and Fredericka had married Sir James.
I wondered if maybe Lady Susan " took one for the team" and agreed to marry the idjit so that her very reluctant daughter didn’t have to, but your analysis is probably more on the mark (it’s “Frederica,” BTW).
I see that Sevigny was born in Mass. but raised in Conn., so that may partly explain why they gave her character an American origin: Chloë Sevigny - Wikipedia.
I presume that what happened in the casting of this movie is that Stillman, who’s only been able to make one film and one TV pilot in the past 18 years, decided that maybe he could get a film made if he adapted a Jane Austen work. He looked at Lady Susan and noticed that with a little rewriting it would fit his sort of movies. What’s more, he noticed that it would work for Beckinsale and Sevigny, who costarred in The Last Days of Disco. In fact, their characters interacted similarly in that film to the one he wanted to made. He was thus able to sell it on the basis of those two actresses and the fact that it was an Austen adaptation. I suspect that while making the film, he realized that Sevigny wasn’t able to do a good British accent, so he rewrote her part to be from Connecticut (where she actually grew up). Perhaps Stillman decided that since Beckinsale is now 42 and Sevigny is now 41, he better made the film quickly, since it requires Beckinsale’s character to be young enough to become pregnant. I suspect that the character in the original story is supposed to be about 36, since she has a 16-year-old daughter but is young enough to get pregnant.
Lady Susan’s pregnancy is actually Stillman’s invention, it’s not in the original story. You’re right about Lady Susan’s age in the novella though, she’s 35, so young enough that pregnancy was a possibility but old enough for Reginald’s father to be concerned (as he is in the movie) that she’d be unable to produce an heir.
Lady Susan’s second marriage happens in a hurry in the novella, but her haste seems to be because Miss Manwaring (Lord Manwaring’s younger sister, seen briefly at the beginning of the movie) has come to London hoping to regain Sir James’s interest.
ETA:
Ha, during the movie I was thinking that Sir James would be an Upperclass Twit of the Year champion.
She told Sir James the day after their wedding she was pregnant. She needed an unmarried guy to quickly marry her to handle being with Manwaring’s child. And a stupid fellow would be best, someone who wouldn’t question the timing and all. He also was perfectly fine with Manwaring accompanying them to Churchill. Which allows her “friendship” with Manwaring to continue unhindered.
I suspect even when Sir James (inevitably?) catches his wife and Manwaring in an indiscreet moment, she’ll be able to sweetly explain it away to his entire satisfaction.