Becoming Jane

Directed by Julian Jarrold. Screenplay by Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams, based on Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence. With Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Ian Richardson and Maggie Smith. (PG)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of 10 dollars must be in want of a chick flick. She will find it most agreeable if it has a headstrong yet amiable heroine, a handsome but mysterious leading man, and of course a happy ending. If only Jane Austen had written a few more novels.

Lacking an Austen novel in want of a film (Northanger Abbey, anyone?) Becoming Jane takes the early career of Jane Austen and shoehorns it into one of her own. Based on a 2003 biography by Jon Spence that located the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice in an alleged romance between the young writer and a visiting Irishman, Becoming Jane is of that hoary subgenre of biopics that seek to contain genius by ascribing it to an unfortunate incident, as if artistic greatness were within the grasp of anyone with enough misfortune.

Anne Hathaway plays this not-so-plain Jane, and James McAvoy (who is no Colin Firth) plays the object of her affections, a dissipated wastrel in elevator boots who seems hardly worthy to clean the great author's pens. Like Mr. Darcy, he turns out to be guarding the secret that he's a much better person than he appears. Jane's easygoing father and marriage-minded mother (James Cromwell and Julie Walters) are clearly based on the Bennets, and the wealthy Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith), a wholly invented character with a more suitable nephew for Jane, is proposed as the inspiration for Lady Catherine De Bourgh. The pallid nephew, we are told, is likely to be Jane's best offer, which is doubtful when she looks like Anne Hathaway.

Director Julian Jarrold's model is Joe Wright's unaccountably popular 2005 Pride and Prejudice; Jane is conceived as a thoroughly modern tomboy in the manner of Kiera Knightly and the Austen home is, like the Bennet's in that film, a working farm. And in the manner of Roger Michell's influential 1995 film of Persuasion, Jarrold's approach is naturalistic, which means mud, gray skies, and in this case a haphazard handheld camera that occasions some oddly framed scenes. In this way Becoming Jane lacks the easy pleasures of costume dramas, but it doesn't substitute anything interesting in its place. All this aggressive realism does nothing to obscure Becoming Jane's offensively retro premise: that Austen needed a man to make her an author — not just to break her heart but to expand her literary horizons. Even the first six lines of Pride and Prejudice are provided by a man.

The Ten

Directed by David Wain. Screenplay by Ken Marino and David Wain. With Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Famke Janssen, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Ken Marino, A.D. Miles, Gretchen Mol, Oliver Platt, Paul Rudd, Winona Ryder, Liev Schreiber, Justin Theroux and Michael Ziegfeld. (R)

Sometime during, say, the ninth hour of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue, did you think, "Hey, I wonder what this would be like remade by the former members of the sketch comedy group The State?" I'm not stretching here. Director David Wain says as much in the press notes, except "Our version is much shorter and much funnier and (mostly) does not take place in a Polish apartment building." Well, it is shorter.

Sketches on The State, which ran on MTV in the early '90s when its members were just out of NYU, frequently seemed to be missing something in the execution, and only in brief moments of absurdity, such as when swingers Barry and Levon (Thomas Lennon and Michael Ian Black) rubbed their butts in $240 worth of pudding, did it rise above its pandering sludge of gross-out humor. Now its alumni (who have gone on to Reno 911! and providing commentary on VH1 nostalgia shows) are pushing 40, but they're still making poopy jokes, and when that fails there's gay panic and a fear of female sexuality more appropriate to prepubescent boys. (There was only one woman in 11-member State, the admirable Kerri Kenney.) The Ten, a series of not terribly cautionary tales inspired by The Ten Commandments and written by Wain and the conspicuously unfunny Ken Marino (who plays an ill-fated doctor) does have The State's flashes of inspired surrealism, such as when a bum plays a xylophone in a flophouse. And then someone takes another shit. Or says they want to. Or Winona Ryder humps a ventriloquist's dummy.

Each of the 10 segments is introduced by a curiously churlish Paul Rudd (you were expecting Charlton Heston?), playing an adulterer who has abandoned his wife (Famke Janssen) for a young airhead (Jessica Alba). In a theatrical conceit that is the most interesting thing about the film, most of this story plays out in a Thornton Wilderian black box (think The Skin of our Teeth with less charm). As for the rest, about half the stories are funny, but only the one about a 35-year-old virgin (Gretchen Mol) on vacation in Mexico is fully realized. More typical is the one in which Liev Schreiber covets his neighbor's CAT scan machine, a hilarious premise quickly trashed by a conclusion that makes no sense. (CAT scan machines are useful diagnostic tools for many ailments, but obviously not for radiation poisoning.) Do Wain and Marino think their audience is stupid? And is that why some of their highbrow references make as little sense, even as jokes, as the CAT scan story? What exactly is funny about a novel by Jonathan Lethem titled The? Have these guys actually read Jonathan Lethem?

Manufactured Landscapes

Directed by Jennifer Baichwal. (NR)

Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, opens with an eight-minute horizontal pan of a factory floor in China. Shot by cinematographer Peter Mettler, it announces that this film is something more than an artist-at-work documentary; indeed, Burtynsky's work seems to be a pretext for an essay on the price of industrialization in the most rapidly industrializing country in the world.

Burtynsky, a nature photographer who became fascinated by the mines and quarries left behind by the extraction industries, has moved on to the industrial landscapes of China, photographing vast factory floors and campuses. In the scene that follows the eight-minute pan, yellow-uniformed workers outside are being berated by their supervisor. As the camera pulls back we see hundreds of workers congregating on the blacktop, their uniforms the exact color of the factory buildings' walls. Then we hear Burtynsky's voice, and we realize that they are waiting to pose for one of his pictures. This curious shift in perspective shifts right back once we return to the factory floor, as a woman who would be one of a sea of faces in a Burtynsky photograph explains exactly what she does.

Oil, which Burtynsky calls "a key building block of the last century," flows through the artist's landscapes, from oil refineries to overhead shots of Los Angeles' twisting network of highways to the plastic so in demand in China's factories. We see the new jobs that industrialization has created: an old woman sorting parts from old PCs (what the Chinese call "e-waste"), residents taking apart their own cities, brick by brick, to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, and a chic real estate developer whose gut-renovated home stands in stark contrast to the leveled slums around her. Burtynsky sees China, with its unregulated and whiplash-fast development, as both a micro- and macrocosm of how industrialization has ravaged both the natural landscape and the lives of those who inhabit it. "If we destroy nature we destroy ourselves," says Burtynsky. As the proverbial canary in the coalmine, China's runaway industrialization emerges as a cautionary tale, told too late.

Send comments to editor@hartfordadvocate.com