Being somewhat spandex fatigued by summer superhero movies, it seemed like time for something very different, so we decided to be about as different from Captain America as the current film offerings would allow. A new movie, “Love and Friendship” was starting at our local art house. The film was directed and written by Whit Stillman, who, surprisingly, is not British but American, and stars Kate Beckinsale as the scheming Lady Susan Vernon. I have to admit that it’s been a long time since I read anything by Austin, who originated the story (Lady Susan) as that strangest of genres, an epistolary novel, and I have never seen Beckinsale dressed in lace and frills using her native British accent, and I have not seen anything this old-timey British for a long time, so it’s a bit of a culture shift. There are no Underworld vampires anywhere in this movie. Love and Friendship is a comedy-lite; the laughs are mainly polite chuckles, but only if you comprehend the antiquated English language, endless sentences and subtle nuances of this sort of conversational story.
The story is set somewhere in the late 1700’s, in a large ruling class country house, outside what one of the characters describes as the grime, vile odors, dust and disease of the city (London). It’s also a world where people you know or family members feel free to just have the footman drive the carriage up to the front door with a bunch of trunks, so you can stay for some weeks or months. The interior of the big house, tinkly china, polite conversation that’s loaded with barbs and subtle insults, stoic servants and “help” with lower class accents are the setting for this drawing room story. There’s NO action. At all.
The story begins when Lady Susan and her marriage-aged daughter show up at her in-laws house, as expected, with coach and trunks. Susan is recently widowed, lacking in fortune, and is the subject of rumors and gossip that she is a schemer. In addition to Susan, a variety of other hangers-on, relatives and neighbors pop in and out of the house or come to stay for a while, throughout the story. Susan wants to scheme a marriage, both for herself and her daughter. Suitable men could be young and handsome with good breeding and prospects, older and already rich or both (preferably stupid if they are old and rich), but certainly NOT none of the above. The wealthy De Coucys, the Martins, and Manwarings are all targets of her plots. Her calculations are without end, all taking place in this bucolic estate, centered around tea, good manners, meals, sitting rooms, parlors, and any other polite venue. Lady Susan is quite a character. She might seem to be a villain, being such a schemer, but when you realize that her lack of money and widowed status could easily leave her and her daughter scrubbing floors for these overprivileged characters, you can’t help thinking that she’s doing what she needs to do to keep a good life for herself. She’s playing the wealth and class game as the rules are written, an understandable anti-heroine who’s smarter than anybody else in the drawing room.
I won’t go on much further about the plot, since all the twists and turns of who is cheating on who, who is “available”, who is reaching above their status in society, etc would be longer than the movie itself and WAY above MY social status. I will clearly say that you need to be in the right mood to see the movie, but that, if you are, it’s really quite good. I probably should see it again, since a lot of the language and manners were lost on me until I got my bearings on the time and place. It’s not an easy movie for viewers who are used to the FX heavy scripts and terse language of a lot of popular fare. There’s no revealed sex, no violence, no chases (even in a carriage) and all of the characters are clearly earthlings of the old English sort.
My previous experiences with Kate Beckinsale have mainly been as a pretty face in Pearl Harbor or a leather-clad warrior on the hunt for werewolves, so her performance in Love and Friendship surprised me. The rest of the cast is very British and seemed to slip into their roles easily. Cinematography is quite florid, and the entire movie appears to be made with sets, costumes and makeup, no special effects are evident anywhere. You really have to be ready for a very talky movie. Susan’s endless plotting is the fun part of the movie, so you have to listen carefully to all of the subtle implications of her dialog. I ended up enjoying this more than I might have expected. It’s really well done. I don’t know Austin well enough to have any idea whether the movie does justice to the original, but it’s such an alien time and place to me that I’m not sure I would appreciate the difference from the source. I give this a good recommendation IF (a big IF) you’re in the right mindset. The enjoyment of the movie is in the characters, scheming, wit and dialog, so you have to pay attention, but if you do, it’s quite good. It’s currently sitting at an exalted 99% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 84% with audiences and 7.5 on IMDB, so not everybody is thrilled, but I did enjoy it.
