Reviewing Jane: Now I Must Give One Smirk, And Then We May Be Rational Again

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 2007

Director: Jon Jones

Cast: Felicity Jones, JJ Feild, Carey Mulligan

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey is defined by a certain lack of plot and a coterie of hilariously biting, satirical characters, so it's probably the most likely entry to be adapted into a film that exactly fits my tastes. There's nothing I love more than a brisk, character-driven movie. But unfortunately, Northanger Abbey is perhaps the least known and least respected of her six novels, so it was never going to get the grandiose big-budget treatment of a Pride and Prejudice (take your pick which one I'm talking about).

It's just one of the endless pitfalls of having good taste.

In Northanger Abbey (the 2007 Masterpiece production, and boy oh boy is it going to be important to specify which one we're talking about as we get deeper into this marathon - there's literally two iterations of Emma from the exact same year), Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) is a young teen from a family of ten. She's invited on a trip to the town of Bath with some family friends, and she doesn't hesitate at her chance to get out and see the wider world, which she's only read about in books.

Unfortunately, her perceptions of the world and the people in it are entirely based on the plots of the Gothic romance novels she devours, so she has herself a bit of a vivid imagination that hasn't exactly prepared her for the mundane realities and pettiness of the people she meets there. Although she falls in love immediately with the handsome gentleman Henry Tilney (JJ Feild, who we just saw playing a Darcy analogue in Austenland), she encounters certain obstacles in the form of the lecherous boor John Thorpe (William Beck), who fancies himself in love with her; his sister Isabella (Carey Mulligan, who we will see playing one of the assorted sisters in Pride and Prejudice - get ready for a bunch of overlaps, because the British do not skimp on their Austen adaptations), a false-faced dilettante who fancies herself in love with Catherine's brother James (Hugh O'Connor), until somebody better comes along; and Tilney's father (Liam Cunningham), a dictatorial tyrant with a nasty temper.

She is also exposed to a great number of terrible hats, such is the danger of the outside world.

Northanger Abbey is very clearly a low budget affair, but the good thing about shooting in England is that the whole country is basically a period piece, so it doesn't weigh on your wallet to find some grand crumbling castle or other to shoot in. So the locations at least provide a level of production quality that isn't reflected in, say, the lighting. 

But one odd choice that makes itself immediately known is the way that Northanger Abbey sexes up the original storyline. This only rears its ugly head in a few cases - most notably in a dalliance between Carey Mulligan and someone who is patently not her fiancé, but also in some truly disgusting extras work that includes the line "she's a ripe peach ready for the plucking" - but it's a jarring decision that adds nothing to the work and doesn't commit hard enough to feel like anything more than lascivious window dressing. It's a horny movie, but it's still a Masterpiece Theatre production, so there's a very low ceiling for what is permitted here. It feels slightly at war with its own impulses, which I guess makes it in and of itself a perfect Jane Austen character, but definitely not a satisfyingly consistent narrative.

You can't just show SHOULDERS and expect to get away with it, Masterpiece!

Also there's no getting around the score, which is just tragically miscalculated. It's like the Harry Potter theme got co-opted by a Steamboat Willie short, and it cartoonishly underscores every minuscule movement onscreen. If it turns out it's not royalty-free library music, I'd definitely start to worry about the sanity of whoever composed it, because they clearly fundamentally misunderstand the tone of Jane Austen, and possibly humanity as a whole.

But hey, we can forgive a movie its budget if it's engaging, and Northanger Abbey is... well, it tries. The most important visual element introduced into the story is frequent Scrubs-esque cutaways to Catherine Morland's imagination of what any particular moment will be like. She recasts the important figures in her life into a grand Gothic soap opera that is tremendously fun to watch, and really highlights the character perhaps even more than the book manages to. Unfortunately, this element is dropped exactly where it is needed most - when Catherine's explorations of the titular home of the Tilneys lead her to some very dangerous, incorrect assumptions about the Northanger patriarch.

The plot of the third act suffers mightily from a lack of these fantasies, telling rather than showing the entire conflict that drives the climax. You need to have read the book to get even a drop of tension out of the plot at this point, and if your movie's success relies on a viewer having read the least well-known Austen novel, that is a gargantuan failure.

JJ Feild's face isn't a failure though, so that helps smooth things over.

But Northanger Abbey isn't all bad. The pacing is fleet-footed, zipping past so quickly, you couldn't possibly be bored. And while nearly the entire ensemble gives the kind of flat, utilitarian performance you'd expect from a Masterpiece production, the three leads all provide something exciting to watch.

Felicity Jones, on the one hand, is kind of awe-inspiringly terrible, and that's not nothing. She has a rough-hewn movie star charisma that you can't help but watch, even as she indulges in a routine of indicative gawping every chance she gets. It's like she's trying to be a mime or something, and it's fascinating, but you can see the potential for her to become to blandly functional leading actress we know her as today.

Acting circles around her are the real reasons to watch the movie: Feild and especially Mulligan. Feild's Tilney is rakish and charming without seeming too much like a romantic cypher, and he and Jones have a genuine chemistry. But enough about men. This is a Jane Austen novel, and Carey Mulligan is pulling out all the stops here, burying her character's hopeless self-absorption in a series of fluttery little genteel movements that are just aching to be watched rapturously by any fan of a good diva.

All in all, Northanger Abbey is a reasonably satisfying first venture into the world of Austen, if not particularly inspiring. There are going to be a lot of future movie stars lurking about these here parts, and that excites me, but turning her most shallow novel into an even more shallow movie doesn't exactly lend me toward recommending it.

TL;DR: Northanger Abbey is an unimpressive low budget TV movie with some surprisingly high wattage stars.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1189
Other Films Based on Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey (Foster, 1987)
Ruby in Paradise (Nunez, 1993)
Northanger Abbey (Jones, 2007)

It's A Trap!

Year: 2016

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I liked The Force Awakens a lot, so I’m certainly not against Disney’s attempts to defibrillate the Star Wars universe. But I’m worried that they’re turning the franchise into a Marvel machine, churning out films at an unsustainable rate. They’re raking in billions right now so it doesn’t make business sense to stop, but one day a film is going to jam a wrench in the works and it will all come crumbling down. And if every spinoff is as careless as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which errs on the side of good, but not for lack of trying), that will happen sooner rather than later for George Lucas’ beloved franchise.

But what the f**k do I know? The series survived The Clone Wars, after all.

In Rogue One, we zoom and enhance on a story implied by the plot of the original Star Wars: the acquisition of the plans to the Death Star by Rebel forces. If you don’t know what that means, 1) You don’t exist, and 2) good luck. There is no primer here for newbies. There’s not even an opening credits crawl, which I guess is a luxury reserved for the official Star Wars entries.

Anyway, here we have Jyn Erso (felicity Jones, who is having quite the year), the roguish daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen, who is also having quite the year), who is instrumental in the Empire’s development of the Death Star. She is busted out of prison (she has committed the crime of… being sassy? Who knows. This is a universe where backstories haven’t been invented yet, apparently) by Rebel forces and taken by Cassian Andar (Diego Luna) and his sarcastic droid K2-SO (Alan Tudyk) on various missions to use her family connection and help the Rebels find the Death Star’s weaknesses (and cement over some of the original film’s biggest plot holes once and for all).

On the way, they meet friends who will come along on their journey: the defected imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), blind monk Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) , and his friend Baze Malbu (Wen Jiang), who’s a… soldier? Mercenary? Outlaw? Postal worker? Of all the paper-thin characters, he’s the one who most resembles a random plastic Star Wars action figure pulled from a bucket.

Batting for the Empire’s side, we have Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the ambitious man in charge of Death Star development, Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry with a Getty Images still of Peter Cushing glued to his face), and some random imperial henchman called Darth… something.

There’s a lot of weird names in this movie, you can’t expect me to remember them all.

OK, guys. I’m about to rip into Rogue One quite a bit, but there are some things you should know before we dive in. First, this is an exciting popcorn action movie with stellar special effects (minus one horrifying rictus mask of Peter Cushing) so every complaint relative to its entry in the canon of Great Cinema is kind of pointless. And there’s one thing that I or anybody else can’t take away form it: Rogue One has an astoundingly diverse cast. The only white person on our ragtag crew is a woman, and the rest are Latino, Asian, Pakistani, and so on as we descend the cast list to its further reaches. And there’s not a dud in the bunch. This kind of representation is seamless, avoiding tokenism or calling itself out for how progressive it is. This is how all of Hollywood needs to start casting tentpole movies As Soon as F**king Possible.

I don’t have a punchline for this. The idea that non-white kids across the world have an entry point for dreaming of traveling the stars is just too sweet.

So, yeah, the script. It’s a rule of thumb of mine that a screenplay is terrible if it has a flashback to something that happened ten minutes before. ...Guess what Rogue One has. Yeah. 

This movie has no trust that the audience will understand its barbarically simple character arcs, so it chews the plot into mush and vomits bit back down your throat. It also strikes upon its themes with the grace and delicacy of a hippo on a pogo stick. You can practically see the highlighted-all-caps-italics on the page whenever they utter stilted lines about hope, geddit? This is a story that treats its thematic buzzwords like they’re holy writ, but doesn’t have the right kind of characters to get that over-earnest tone across.

Only Jyn has any kind of development or backstory, but her character arc conveniently avoids requiring her to actually make any real decisions about her values. Everyone else is drawn with an Etch-a-Sketch, given one character trait if they’re lucky. They’re well-acted repositories of action movie quips, but they’re not compelling in the slightest. And I’m sorry K2-SO, you have some solid line deliveries but you just don’t pass muster in a Droid Sidekick pantheon that incudes f**king R2-D2, C-3PO, and now BB-8. Your name isn’t even as catchy, man. Put some elbow grease into it.

The villains suffer much the same fate. Krennic’s one note characterization can’t survive the litany of cameos shoehorned into the film, creating an endless parade of my least favorite type of scene in movie history: two identical old white dudes yelling at each other. And while Vader gets a showstopping sequence in the third act, there’s no reason to have him appear before that, especially with Spencer Wilding’s garish pantomiming during the dialogue scenes.

Maybe he’s been taking ballet classes since Episode III.

It’s probably likely that I forgot how militaristic the rest of the franchise is. They do, after all, ask that we cheer while literally faceless evil masses are mown down, but wail in tragedy any time some random pilot in orange beefs it. But it’s a bit shocking what a jingoistic, patriotic hash Rogue One becomes. If you love noble sacrifices and people clutching corpses while screaming toward the heavens, this is the movie for you. But as a distinct anti-fan of war movies, I find its jaunts toward the tone of 300 troubling, especially considering what a Wacky thrill ride it so clearly yearns to be in most of the other scenes.

This is a movie that, within minutes of each other, has a blind monk deliver Jackie Chan-esque quips while kicking ass, and shows a crying girl shrieking in a dusty street as her city is laid to waste by laser fire. These two sides of Rogue One are distinctly incompatible, and their clash creates the biggest fissure in the surface of a film already spiderwebbed with cracks.

It doesn’t necessarily break (though, in its dull first act that hops from planet to planet in a grueling, pointless gauntlet, it frequently threatens to), but Rogue One is definitely a misstep. While it’s still a Star Wars film and thus worth a shut-your-brain-off, popcorn-munching watch, unless they really step it up with these side stories, the whole thing is gonna capsize before you know it.

TL;DR: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is decently amusing and boasts an incredible cast, but it can't overcome ghastly tonal shifts and a general sense of silliness.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1228
Reviews In This Series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Howard, 2018)

Through The Fire And Flames

Year: 2016

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I have a love-hate relationship with Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series, in that they’re terrible but I have an urgent, pathological need to read them and mock them. The art-based puzzle adventures are ludicrous works of revisionist history so transparently indulging in the lusty fantasies of an aging academic that they give pretty unprecedented access to the inner workings of a pulp author’s soul. They’re fascinating, personal stories cobbled together from the gaudiest ingredients of James Bond and Indiana Jones.

The Ron Howard-Tom Hanks film adaptations of said franchise fail to capture this garish self-indulgence (probably because not even the most hard-up individual in the world would consider Tom Hanks as a scholarly but smoldering sex symbol), so they’ve never been of particular interest to me. However, I needed some candidates for my worst of 2016 list, so I went to see Inferno (the third movie, based on the fourth book). You can imagine my surprise when it turned out to be kind of OK.

Even if you can’t, allow me to replicate that feeling now.

Florence, Italy. Real-job-haver, symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) wakes up in a hospital with no recollection of the previous 48 hours or how and why he is not in his apartment at Cambridge. When people begin shooting at him, he and his new sexy sidekick, ER doctor Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), flee.

Then, for reasons too convoluted to explain in a single paragraph, they must follow yet another path of art-based clues (this time all related to Dante’s Inferno) to discover the location of a world-destroying plague set to be released in 12 hours. This plague was developed by the mad billionaire/TED Talk-giver Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) who killed himself three days ago. They’re also being chased by pretty much everyone in the known world: the W.H.O., assorted double agents, and a mysterious syndicate led by the amoral Harry Sims (Irrfan Khan). But WHO can they trust?

Geddit?

Let’s get this straight. Inferno is goddamn pulp. Adding a vague, age-appropriate love interest into the mix does not improve the source material, so it’s still a garbled, convoluted mess of a story. But it’s also the best of the bunch, opening with a bang by tossing us into the situation at the same time as the amnesiac Langdon. Although this sequence is frustratingly marred by constant reminders of his mental state in the form of nauseating, blurry Paul Greengrass camerawork, it also produces some of the best imagery of the whole series.

I should mention that this imagery is also balls-out terrifying, depicting – in the form of Langdon’s post-injury hallucinations – the grotesque stages of Dante’s Hell in lurid, live-action glory. It’s almost too disturbing, but the disgusting (sinners with their heads twisted around, etc.) blends with the elegant (a building with glass windows that explode into a geyser of blood like The Shining on amphetamines) to create something truly arresting. It’s been a long time since an image in a Ron Howard movie has actually wowed me, and while it might be too horrific for average audiences, I find its boldness refreshing.

What are YOU lookin’ at?

It might sound like I’m just being an easy lay for horror imagery, but I assume you I’m not. I love when a cookie cutter blockbuster takes off in any unique direction, and horror is one of many fringe genres Hollywood should call upon more often in their tentpole flicks. On the flipside of that coin though, I am always an easy lay for synth-driven soundtracks and the delightfully Carpenterian tangents in Hans Zimmer’s score fascinate me to no end.

There’s a lot of unique and interesting stuff going on in Inferno, which pushes it to the head of the pack. But it’s still a Dan Brown movie, so let’s not get carried away. To be frank, the film assumes that we’re drooling idiots. Langdon reads a four-line email to himself about three times while the camera lingers over every word, just to make sure we get it, and every major clue is repeated ceaselessly like this is a kindergarten math class.

"See those N, Y, and C symbols? Those probably point to New York!"

Because it assumes we know nothing about anything (except, apparently, the finer details of Dante’s Inferno, which it completely fails to elaborate on), the film indulges in two of the hoariest tropes of adventure cinema: the magical doctor and the magical academic. Although Langdon’s area of expertise is symbology (still not a real job), he’s also apparently an expert on art, history, architecture, city planning, and –what the hell – probably rocket science. The sheer amount of pseudo-intellectual babble that spills from Langdon, a character who is actively suffering from a head injury, is Hollywood shortcutting at its worst.

Obviously this is a carryover from the novel, as is the dreadfully wooden dialogue (“I can’t believe you have the temerity to ask that I simply decide to…”), but Hanks drowns in the nitty-gritty of the role, which stifles his own natural charm and considerable dramatic talents to provide a truly boring protagonist. But I don’t blame him. Boring is better than irritating, which his constant outbursts about the thematic importance of doorways threatens to have him become.

So, yeah. Don’t think I’m singing Inferno’s praises to the high heavens (the scene where someone is shocked that a European speaks French because she’s – gasp - a woman, was already enough to knock off a point or two). But its daring horrific elements, a killer final setpiece, and an incoherent but reasonably twisty plot fueled by Irrfan Khan’s deliciously banal evil performance make for a decent enough popcorn thrill ride.

TL;DR: Inferno is a surprisingly decent popcorn thriller, possibly the best of its anemic franchise.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 986