Love & Friendship

The funniest, most deliciously venomous Jane Austen movie ever made, and conclusive proof that, a) Kate Beckinsale has been seriously undervalued by the movies and, b) Whit Stillman is a major, distinctive talent.

It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.

Love & Friendship is pure pleasure, from the lavishly precise sets and costumes to the pitch-perfect tone. It’s self-consciously mannered and merrily playful; a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

Stillman pushes the comedy right up to the edge of screwball.

Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.

Love & Friendship looks splendid. If the costumes by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh (“Cavalry”) were any more beautiful, they’d be too beautiful.

Cheeky in its approach as well as spirited and good-natured, this enterprising adaptation of the author’s relatively unfamiliar early novella Lady Susan remains buoyant through most of its short running time but lacks the stirring emotional hooks found in the best Austen works, on the page as well as the screen.

This film works so well because it’s a kind of cautionary tale about toxic agendas and the people who become “possessed” by them. The film is a kind of horror story in which all the horror is just below the surface where (as Freud and Jung etc. have observed) it can do the most damage. Kate Beckinsale, the delightful star of the film, and director Whit Stillman succeed so brilliantly in concocting their sardonic vision of 18th century English society that in many ways the result invites comparison with Alexander MacKendrick’s great and scathing 1957 muck-raking classic “Sweet Smell of Success”. Beckinsale’s inspired, in fact jaw-dropping performance here as a sort of wayward 18th century Soccer Mom run amok and gone dangerously to seed is a challenge to describe in mere words. But begin by thinking Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” meets Nancy Reagan on a Bad Hair day and you are on the right **** fact all of “Love and Friendship” feels VERY CONTEMPORARY and can be seen as a political metaphor for the emergence of today’s neoliberal social and economic environment complete with 1%-Push Coming Austerity-Shove !…..In a world in which the Looking-Out-for- Number-One lifestyle has become the order of the day and successfully implanted into our DNA, Kate Beckinsale’s sociopathic Lady Susan could easily be running for political office on a “Let them eat cake” ticket. The film has a few momentary missteps and unfortunately these come in first five minutes and can have the effect of setting off considerable alarm bells……Happily this lapse in creative judgment is momentary and film quickly finds its own rhythm and soon moves from strength to strength. (The early lapses consist of a few “goofy” shots in which we are rapidly shown the names and faces of a dozen or so characters in the story. However, these shots which are intended as a sort of parody of early silent movies. are done so rapidly as to be meaningless as information and (more grievous artistically) don’t really work as parody because they’re out of place with the very traditional and very solid narrative that follows. Whit Stillman is an extremely interesting filmmaker and his films “Metropolitan” and “The Last Days of Disco” are two of the most original American films of recent memory. Even more good news here is that both Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny who star here also starred in “The Last Days of Disco” and each instinctively understands “the Stillman universe”. In fact Beckinsale’s performance here is nothing short of mesmerizing and you can’t wait to see what she will say or do next !……But anyone deciding to see the film should go prepared for a more sombre Jane Austen story than usual (the Nancy Reagan/Mrs. Robinson angle) so maybe think Jane Austen with a hefty dollop of Henry James ……. but let me qualify this statement by pointing out that the note of moral seriousness is always present in Jane Austen’s work (and Whit Stillman’s for that matter) and that Austen has a knack of making her “sunshine” so welcome precisely because her “clouds” are real clouds and portend real downpours !……In fact Whit Stillman‘s “Love and Friendship” works so well because he understands this so thoroughly.

Very good production values, acting, and surprisingly funny at point. Kate Beckinsale stands out big time in this adaptation of Jane Austen's book. I thought it was a bit slow for me though.

Kate Beckinsale is good and the costumes in this movie are great, but I think it will appeal mostly to fans of Jane Austin films about 18th century British upper class society, their lives and loves. I'm not.

Kate B, and Cloe S seemed to think that they were in a high school production of the Importance of Being Earnest. KB in particular was in way over her head, delivering each line as an epigrammatic bon mot, rather than an expression of her truth, some very bad acting here. she was in way over her head. Fortunately, the rest of the cast were fine actors, and managed to pull this out being a total disaster. There is a reason that this is Jane Austen's least known work.

This is a film that was drastically oversold by the critics. It’s a film where very little to nothing happens. Kate Beckinsale tries her best with it but ultimately it’s a flawed film. There is very little that happens in the film and when things do start getting going, the film ends!!! Admittedly I am not the target audience for this film, I am not a fan of period dramas, especially the Jane Austen period dramas as I think they are often stuck in a formula that is tired and old and they don’t try to do anything contemporary with it, the trailer for this film alluded they were going to to that with this film, however, it doesn’t fully commit to that. The film is not really funny, not very interesting, I would skip it.