We’ve arguably reached a critical saturation point of Jane Austen-inspired films and adaptations of her work. A cursory search of the Internet Move Database turns up at least nine such titles from the past decade, including a Bollywood treatment of “Pride and Prejudice.” And there’s still the forthcoming adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” with which to contend.
Perhaps it’s a relief, then, that despite having her surname in its title, “Austenland” hasn’t much to do with the English author or her works — although that might also explain why it’s kind of terrible, because it possesses neither the wit nor romance of its benefactress.
Keri Russell plays Jane, an Austen obsessive (she would use the term “aficionado”) with a house that looks like a Victorian tearoom, all matching tea sets, floral upholstery and cameos and the crowning glory, a life-size cardboard cutout of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, whom he played in the peerless 1995 BBC adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice.”
Unmarried and unattached with unrealistic expectations of romance in the modern age, Jane blows her life savings in a gambit to get the Austen out of her system with a trip to Austenland, a remote British retreat that seeks to re-create Austen’s Regency-era settings. The experience comes complete with corsets, carriage rides, pheasant hunting and natty gentleman, hired actors commissioned to woo their paying lady loves and fulfill romantic fantasies.
There the simpering Jane finds two potential paramours: Mr. Henry Nobley (J.J. Feild), the proper Mr. Darcy stand-in who’s appropriately standoffish; and Martin (Bret McKenzie), a scruffy stableboy and groundsman. In typical Austen fashion, neither man proves to be exactly whom he seems.
But that’s as Austen as it gets. “Pride and Prejudice” is the only Austen work that gets so much as a name-drop. And even Jane, the self-professed fanatic who claims to have read all of Austen’s works, doesn’t seem to have learned many lessons from her readings.
“An Austen heroine gets engaged by the end of the book,” she proclaims, “so that’s what I’m going to do.” The film does little delving into what could make a modern woman so hung up on the romantic conventions of yesteryear, even less with complications of class conflict.
Jane’s fellow vacationers turn in supremely annoying performances, especially Jennifer Coolidge, whose affected Miss Elizabeth Charming character mows down everything in its way with a bull-in-a-china-shop quality to score cheap laughs with poorly accented double entendres. Georgia King, meanwhile, mugs her way through the film with facial expressions suggestive of various states of intestinal distress.
It’s that artless sense of free-for-all absurdity that makes the film start to feel like a “Saturday Night Live” skit that has run too long. Even the soundtrack irritates, playing out like an anachronistic ’80s mixtape: Roxette, “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” “Bette Davis Eyes.” None of it fits, but that’s the point. It’s so smugly ironic, it may as well have been gangster rap.
It makes sense, though, considering the source. “Austenland” is the directorial debut of Jerusha Hess, wife and screenwriting partner of Jared Hess, the team behind such absurdist comedies as “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre,” films that fetishize weirdness for its own sake. It’s little surprise, then, that “Austenland” plays out like an overly elaborate excuse to have people act silly in corsets and bloomers.
The sense of wasted opportunity rankles. It might scratch the itch if, like Jane, you’re hard up for a Darcy fix. But you’re better off watching Firth’s “Pride and Prejudice” instead of just admiring his cardboard cutout.