"Becoming Jane" catches Anne Hathaway at a dip in her career — in the valley terrain where the "Get Smart" series stands like midrate hotels in a remote holiday resort, situated between the high-profile "The Devil Wears Prada" and the deceptively low-rent, indie-sheen of "Rachel Getting Married." She's still carting around some of her "Princess Diaries" haughtiness, but minus any street cred, and she seems a little uncomfortable with her striking, patrician beauty. But all that works to her credit in "Becoming Jane," a late 18th-century love story and the film shows Hathaway (in the title role), by turns confident and independent, insecure and defensive.
Directed by Julian Jarrold, "Becoming Jane" is a fuzzy, fictional biopic that zeros in on an affair that English novelist Jane Austen may or may not have had, emphasis on the may not. Uncertainty is the defining concept here.
For an actress, playing Jane Austen is probably not quite the same thing as playing the intuitive Emma ("Emma," Gwyneth Paltrow) or the flighty Marianne ("Sense and Sensibility," Kate Winslet) — landmark roles of successful careers. Very little is known about Jane Austen's personal life. Unlike, say, Virginia Woolf, she never broadcasted her escapades (if indeed she had any) and she was a rarity among women of letters in that she avoided — like the plague — social events, parlor games and other 18th-century Facebook equivalents. She wrote, she guarded her privacy and subsequently left little for biographers and fan sites.