I originally had low expectations of Becoming Jane, the film purporting to be an account of the early part of Jane Austen’s career as an author. Then a couple of good reviews and a fun-looking trailer lured me in. Hmm. I think if I’d gone with my original mindset, I might not have been so disappointed.

What was good? Well, I don’t mind paying $6 to watch beautiful English countryside and listen to people talking with English accents for a couple of hours at the moment. Anne Hathaway in the lead role just about pulls off the accent without it grating. And there were a couple of really excellent scenes – the dance at the second ball, Cassandra hearing news of her fiance. Interestingly, these were both scenes with little or no dialogue.

Sadly, the script was one of the worst features of the film. Even Maggie Smith was struggling to pull off her lines. Nobody sounded like they could possibly have been in Regency England. At best, the characters might have escaped from a Georgette Heyer novel. (I like Georgette Heyer novels a lot, but Austen they are not.) My least favourite line of all: ‘You wrote the judge!’ No, no he didn’t. He wrote a letter. He wrote to the judge. He did not write the judge. *shudder*

Few of the actors really seemed to have grasped the cadence and rhythm of speech required for the sort of long-winded speeches they were given. All too often, lines were gabbled and stumbled over in haste, without clear enunciation nor any sense of timing. Ian Richardson, in his last film role before his death, was a notable exception here.

But worse than all this was the plot. Perhaps if the lead character had not been called Jane Austen, we could have forgiven them some of the details, but as it was, it bore no resemblance to anything we know of Austen’s life and brief romance. Rather, it was a badly worked attempt to rip off Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice. Just in case any viewer might not have noticed the anvil-sized hints, Jane in the film is seen writing the book, including its famous opening line.

And finally, the unbecoming behaviour of the character called Jane: attending prize fights, eloping with her lover, sneaking down to the river to watch her brother and his friend skinny-dipping. Anne Hathaway portrays her as a 21st century independent thinker with no manners and few morals.

I’ve just started reading Miniatures and Morals, Peter Leithart’s analysis of Austen’s novels. He argues, I think persuasively, that for Austen manners and morals coincide. Leithart suggests that Austen is perhaps the most theologically sophisticated of all English novelists, as she sets her characters the task of living out the gospel in the choices of their everyday lives.

Austen shows little interest in speculative theology, or in religious experience. Still, her novels, like all comedies, may be read as allegories of redemption. The moral insight achieved by her flawed heroines often looks like religious conversion, and even the sudden surprise of love pierces like an arrow of grace. Her men are hardly perfect, but they frequently “save” the heroines, often from the rakish “serpents” who would seduce them. Just as often the bride “saves” the flawed hero. In either case, salvation comes so that man and wife can come together in the consummation of a marriage.

This broader theme is overshadowed by the minutiae of the novels. It is here, on her ‘two inches of ivory’ that Austen can explore the details of what it means to live well. Leithart observes that for Austen this is necessarily a question of community and society, hence the great importance of manners and their close links with morality.

Would that the writers of Becoming Jane had read Miniatures and Morals before they undertook the task of portraying such an extraordinary woman. Or even Austen’s own novels.