Austenland, a clunky broadside aimed at the cult of Jane Austen, is worth seeing primarily for its end credits, a mix of pop oil and water so joyfully dippy it might have produced a stifled giggle even in Herself.
Other than those few precious moments, though, the only virtues of this lumbering farce are those of the much livelier novel from which it’s adapted. Author Shannon Hale’s cheeky wit shone bright in her romp through Austen country and the burgeoning industry it has spawned — an industry that mostly targets Darcy-worshipping American women. Hale co-wrote the screenplay with director Jerusha Hess, but the novelist’s sprightly dialogue seems not to have survived the heavier hand that wrote Napoleon Dynamite.
Hale understood that Austen’s contemporary appeal has less to do with her literary cachet than with the fact that she was the prototypical romance novelist. Pride and Prejudice‘s Mr. Darcy returns in repeat incarnations because he was the original Unavailable Male — filthy rich, craggy of jaw, few of words. (And most of those rude or insulting.) Darcy clones abound on the covers of a thousand Harlequin Romances, ready to be trapped, softened and dragged into wedlock, at least in the dreams of women with a radar for Mr. Wrong.
The movie’s Jane Hayes (played by an uneasy Keri Russell) is an overgrown girl in her 30s, her pastel bedroom stuffed with Austenalia. “I am single,” she explains, “because all the good men are fictional.”