The lavish costumes and lovely real estate - requirements of the genre - are offset by a fizzy, giddy mood of spirited preposterousness. There is plenty of low comedy as well, a bracing silliness that places Austen in the line of British humor that extends through P. Stillman’s script accordingly abounds in rapid-fire sallies of verbal wit that require and reward maximum alertness.
Film love and friendship review movie#
It’s the Whit Stillman movie that some of us have been waiting a long time for, and also a Jane Austen movie that goes some way toward correcting the record of dull and dutiful cinematic Janeism.īased on an early, little-known epistolary novella called “Lady Susan,” “Love & Friendship” is a reminder that Austen was not only a brilliant architect of screen-friendly plots but also a very funny writer. I’m happy to report, in any case, that the release of “ Love & Friendship” mitigates both the shortage and the surfeit.
I refrained from starting that sentence with “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” because it isn’t, and also because that would have been too obvious a way of calling attention to the Austen glut and its attendant clichés.
In the past quarter-century or so, there have been too many Jane Austen movies and too few Whit Stillman movies.