This isn't as good as the unanimously approving critics would have it -- I think they are so fed up with movies where the characters wear spandex that they embrace anything made with adult intelligence -- but it is smart, fast, and funny. Kate Beckinsale is wonderful, and Tom Bennett makes an indelible contribution to the ranks of British upper class twits.
I haven't read Austen's Lady Susan, so I don't know how much of the plot and the dialogue are Austen and how much is Whit Stillman, but they are perfect collaborators. The sense is pure Austen -- a woman alone navigating the always dangerous intersection of sex and money. Stillman's sensibility is a combination of P.G. Wodehouse and Absolutely Fabulous, complete to the conspiratorial confidante and the disapproving daughter.
In his essay on Wodehouse, Orwell wrote that the English seem to believe that intelligence and unscrupulousness are the same thing. Wodehouse, of course, created a whole army of comic aristocratic boneheads. He also created in Frederick, Earl of Ickenham, alias Uncle Fred, a comic sociopath -- a man of great, underemployed intelligence and negligible conscience, whose delight was to make mischief by manipulating the idiots with whom he was surrounded. In intelligence, ready improvisation, utter lack of scruple and self- conscious delight in her own virtuosity, Lady Susan is right up there with Uncle Fred as a comic sociopath, although her impecunious widowhood gives her much greater motivation than Uncle Fred ever had.
Stillman's great achievement, besides keeping up a cracking pace, is that he perfectly controls the tone. We are never in doubt that this brilliantly manipulative, completely unscrupulous, shamelessly devious and flagrantly (by the standards of her time) carnal woman is completely justified in her schemes to find rich husbands for herself and daughter, just as we are never in doubt that the foolish men and perceptive but helplessly indignant women who surround her will get no more than bumps and bruises, and that all will be well, after a fashion, in the end. The one character who is actually wronged suffers with such exaggerated theatricality that she seems ludicrous rather than pitiable. This is a real accomplishment -- in lesser hands, Lady Susan could have turned into either a monster or a sermon.
One trick Stillman uses to keep the emotional distance essential to farce is to show the key courtship conversations either in silent long shot or, in one case, not at all, leaving the audience to imagine what is being said without becoming exposed to the feelings expressed by the characters. The other thing he has going for him is an audience ready to sympathize with Susan's situation as an economically helpless woman at the mercy of men who own everything.
One can see why Austen put this story in the desk drawer and left it there. In Austen's time and for long afterwards, the only way for an author to get away with a character like Susan Vernon was the moral disapproval with which Thackeray portrayed Becky Sharpe and her surroundings. There is none of that here. On the contrary, Austen/Stillman stand astonished and admiring at the verve with which Susan imposes herself on others and the sheer grit with which she tackles her very real difficulties. In the end, her best laid plans are undone by her own appetites and her daughter's unexpected talents, but she makes a remarkable recovery. Along the way she gets to deliver one aphoristic gem after another, at a pace that Oscar Wilde might envy. Great fun, and I recommend it highly.
I haven't read Austen's Lady Susan, so I don't know how much of the plot and the dialogue are Austen and how much is Whit Stillman, but they are perfect collaborators. The sense is pure Austen -- a woman alone navigating the always dangerous intersection of sex and money. Stillman's sensibility is a combination of P.G. Wodehouse and Absolutely Fabulous, complete to the conspiratorial confidante and the disapproving daughter.
In his essay on Wodehouse, Orwell wrote that the English seem to believe that intelligence and unscrupulousness are the same thing. Wodehouse, of course, created a whole army of comic aristocratic boneheads. He also created in Frederick, Earl of Ickenham, alias Uncle Fred, a comic sociopath -- a man of great, underemployed intelligence and negligible conscience, whose delight was to make mischief by manipulating the idiots with whom he was surrounded. In intelligence, ready improvisation, utter lack of scruple and self- conscious delight in her own virtuosity, Lady Susan is right up there with Uncle Fred as a comic sociopath, although her impecunious widowhood gives her much greater motivation than Uncle Fred ever had.
Stillman's great achievement, besides keeping up a cracking pace, is that he perfectly controls the tone. We are never in doubt that this brilliantly manipulative, completely unscrupulous, shamelessly devious and flagrantly (by the standards of her time) carnal woman is completely justified in her schemes to find rich husbands for herself and daughter, just as we are never in doubt that the foolish men and perceptive but helplessly indignant women who surround her will get no more than bumps and bruises, and that all will be well, after a fashion, in the end. The one character who is actually wronged suffers with such exaggerated theatricality that she seems ludicrous rather than pitiable. This is a real accomplishment -- in lesser hands, Lady Susan could have turned into either a monster or a sermon.
One trick Stillman uses to keep the emotional distance essential to farce is to show the key courtship conversations either in silent long shot or, in one case, not at all, leaving the audience to imagine what is being said without becoming exposed to the feelings expressed by the characters. The other thing he has going for him is an audience ready to sympathize with Susan's situation as an economically helpless woman at the mercy of men who own everything.
One can see why Austen put this story in the desk drawer and left it there. In Austen's time and for long afterwards, the only way for an author to get away with a character like Susan Vernon was the moral disapproval with which Thackeray portrayed Becky Sharpe and her surroundings. There is none of that here. On the contrary, Austen/Stillman stand astonished and admiring at the verve with which Susan imposes herself on others and the sheer grit with which she tackles her very real difficulties. In the end, her best laid plans are undone by her own appetites and her daughter's unexpected talents, but she makes a remarkable recovery. Along the way she gets to deliver one aphoristic gem after another, at a pace that Oscar Wilde might envy. Great fun, and I recommend it highly.