Why Austenland is (possibly) a better movie than a book

I loved Shannon Hale's Austenland as a book. And I know, it seems weird for an author to say she liked the movie better, but there are a few cases where a movie that is done very, very well (and usually with a lot of involvement from the author—take note, Hollywood) that the movie does things that the book couldn't. I felt that way with Holes, which is one of the best adaptations of a book ever. To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck is also a movie that adds to the understanding of the book. And I actually think some of the new Austen movies are possibly better than the books, including the 1995 A&E version. Austenland is in this august company.

Not to spoil the book or the movie if you haven't experienced them, but Austenland is about a woman, Jane Hughes, who is obsessed with all things Austen, and in particular with finding a man as wonderful as Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. She has had a miserable romantic life and is about to give up when she gives herself one last chance. She spends all her money on a vacation to “Austenland,” an English resort that promises a “true Austen” experience. Each guest will have a pseudonym and a special romantic story that is meant to unfold during the vacation. Jane ends up with two budding romances, one with a Mr. Darcy type character, and one with a Mr. Wickham type. There is a play within this movie, and a scene close to perfection in which Jane and Mr. Nobley/Mr. Darcy talk about the difference between play acting and truth. It is this scene which I think makes the movie different and better than the book.

The movie and the book both do a wonderful job of making the reader conscious of the foolishness of falling in love with a fictional character. I think this is part of the problem that so many critics have. If you haven't fallen in love with Mr. Darcy, you're going to think Jane Hughes is ridiculous. If you have, however, you sympathize with her enormously. She is foolish, but she has a heart and a mind in the center of that foolishness. She is like the many women who adored Karen Joy Fowler's book “The Jane Austen Book Club” with its constant question about romance, “What would Jane Austen do?”

But this scene in the movie is different than its counterpart in the book. In the book, the reader has to create the characters who inhabit the book. In the movie, Keri Russeel, JJ Feild

and Bret MacKenzie are playing these roles on the screen. We have actors who are pretending to be these characters, adding another layer of falseness to this story about real love and play acting. I think it complicates the situation and forces the reader to work harder at making sense of the story. It's the kind of thing that critics who are trained in post-modernism, Derrida, and critical theory in general ought to recognize. Shannon Hale is making fun of the thing that she is doing. She is drawing attention to the falseness of the story she is telling. But at the same time, she goes right on telling it. The great playwright Bertolt Brecht had actors holding signs saying “I'm an actor” to try to get the audience to stop relating to the characters. Guess what? He couldn't do it. So he worked around that, and got to his radical message a different way.

Are we supposed to uncritically accept the happy ending of Austenland? I don't know that we are. I think that the right viewer will being to ask some really interesting questions about life and love. What is authenticity? When do we play act with loved ones and when do we stop play acting? Is there ever a moment when you are truly yourself? Or do you just have different sides of yourself? How do we know what real love is? Is it because it resembles something from a book or a movie that we felt comfortable with? If what we thought was real love happened in real life, would we believe it?

These are the very kinds of questions that critics ought to want readers to ask, and yet it seems to me they can't see how deep this film is and how subversive of the standard movie culture. This isn't Star Wars, which is all about what is beautiful on the screen and has the kind of simplistic, jingoistic storyline that Americans have been fed since infancy. This is the real deal. This is looking through the mirror and seeing a face in the mirror looking back at you. But it seems that the critics can't see it because they're men and they can't accept that women have actually broken the code and are talking with the same sophisticated language, only using it for their own purposes.

And so to them I say: Gentlemen, the king has no clothes. Long live the queen!