Love & Friendship (2016)

[SeanC]

The pairing of Whit Stillman and Jane Austen is one that would ever have occurred to me, but, upon having been informed of it, became immediately comprehensible. Stillman's whole career has been spent producing erudite upper class comedies, with a sensibility very similar to Austen's Regency-era wit. Here, he adapts Austen's posthumously-published and little-known epistolary novella Lady Susan (confusingly assigned the title of a different Austen work) to great effect.

The resulting film is immensely enjoyable, but also feather-light -- not for a moment of its 92 minute running time is one in any danger of caring about any of the characters or the situations they find themselves in. That may sound like an indictment, but it is not intended as such; the film is solely concerned with observing and inviting us to be amused. And there is quite a gallery of characters on display here, centered around Kate Beckinsale's Lady Susan Vernon. This wouldn't really qualify as a revelatory performance, per se (Lady Susan never has much range as a character), but it's a lot of fun. The same might be said for Tom Bennett, who plays one of the stupidest characters one has encountered in a smart film in several years; this sort of role could easily grate, but Bennett manages to make him endearing.

[methodwriter85]

It was really fun. Whit Stillman stumbled a bit with Damsels in Distress (I liked it but I get why it wasn't received well), but he really returned to form with this.

I'm glad it was a boutique hit- another flop and I think Whit would have been turned off from movies for good.