Step aside, Blanchett. Make room, Winslet. There’s a new Kate in town.
Actually, she’s not new at all. More like rejuvenated. Kate Beckinsale, who’s best work might have been her previous collaboration with director Whit Stillman (Last Days of Disco, 1998) reunites with Stillman in a spot-on, deliciously devilish Jane Austen adaptation. In Love and Friendship, Beckinsale portrays Lady Susan, a complex, cunning raconteur who charms and connives with high social ambitions while remarkably keeping them mostly hidden from view.
The film goads the viewer into thinking an intricate mess of a yarn lays ahead when it piles on characters in its first few minutes by the score. Displaying still shots and names and descriptions on the screen, it’s impossible to keep it all straight, especially with characters we haven’t even met yet. Not to worry. Stillman is having some fun with us, as he also does with visual tricks like flashing on the screen in script form the contents of letters as they are read aloud.
The liberties Stillman takes don’t end there. He also augments the Austen epistolary novella “Lady Susan” with expanded characters. In the book, Sir James Martin was merely an marginal figure. Here, he is elevated to co-star status after first being called a “bit of a rattle,” a British slang for fool. Martin (Tom Bennett) represents a suitor of Lady Susan’s withdrawn 16-year old daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). What does it matter he doesn’t know poetry and verse aren’t opposite things, or, egad, what “tiny green balls” (peas) are–he has plenty of money. His lack of breeding stands in stark contrast to the landowning relatives Lady Susan suddenly finds herself lodging with after the death of her husband.
As usual in these sorts of dramas, the men are various shades of pliable messes and the women far more wiley. Lady Susan seems to have a plan or two up her sleeve. It involves not only Sir James but the far more worldly and gentlemanly Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel). Her partner in crime is an American expatriate (Chloe Sevigny) who is married to a much older Brit who holds her in check with threats of carting her back to that loathsome America.
I don’t recall previous Austen adaptations being this much fun, which is a huge credit to Stillman. In Lady Susan he and Beckinsale have pulled off a heroine who, though essentially unlikable, is irresistible.
In her own way she is much the early feminist who was unfortunately stuck in a late 18th century time period where the only way to get ahead was to piss off a few snobby aristocrats, ignore their classism, and forge a financial security by hook or by crook.