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The Jane Austen Book Club

Directed and written by Robin Swicord

Starring Maria Bello, Emily Blunt and Hugh Dancy

Classification: PG

Rating: **1/2

Of all the players in today's Tinseltown, you just gotta love the resilience of that little dynamo from Regency England. Yep, it's getting to be all Jane Austen all the time. Not content with adapting her works straight to the screen, or updating them for the high-school crowd, or totally reinventing her cloistered personal life, Hollywood now takes a club to the poor woman. Okay, a book club, but it's still quite a mallet, although I'm happy to report that the Austen rep should survive the pummelling – after all, the novels remain a witty portrait of life; this flick is just a study in preciousness.

Set in sunny California and based on Karen Joy Fowler's sunnier tome, the conceit is bug's ear cute: Follow five women and a token guy as they sail through Jane's legacy, every month stopping at a different literary port. You know, if it's May, it must be Northanger Abbey. En route, darned if the readers' own romantic ups-and-downs don't begin to resemble the fictional characters, allowing the grad students in the audience to play spot-the-connection. The rest of us are encouraged to marvel at the plus ça change fact that tales penned so long ago still have plenty of contemporary relevance. Gee, look how the same litany of jealousies and fears and amorous missteps have survived right into the iPod age. That's an awesome concurrence. Or, as Jane herself once text-messaged: How 4-2-itis.

Anyway, we start with a canine funeral and two marriages on the rocks. Jocelyn (Maria Bello) is grieving for her departed pooch, while Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) has just lost her husband of 25 years to the proverbial younger babe. Prudie (Emily Blunt) is newly hitched, but it's already a rocky union. She's a French teacher who has never been to France (which, in these surroundings, qualifies her as the snooty intellectual in the crowd), whereas her mismatched hubby is all jock and half jerk. Rounding out the club's female membership, there's Sylvia's adventurous daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace), whose status seems to alternate between lesbian skydiver and skydiving lesbian. In either role, she's having no luck with the belles. That leaves Bernadette (Kathy Baker), a fiftysomething earth mother who, having read all of Jane countless times, is understandably bereft of pride and prejudice, replete with uncommon sense and sensibility, and awfully persuasive.

As for the token guy, meet Grigg (Hugh Dancy), a handsome fellow of deceptive means – his garb and his manner suggest a modest income, but don't be fooled, ladies. When he sets his cap for Jocelyn, who, valuing friendship over self-interest, nudges him in the direction of the abandoned Sylvia, guess what should form but a love triangle, and we know how complicated that geometry can be. Happily, the math gets easier thanks to those monthly book sessions, where the Messrs. Darcy and Knightley, the Misses Elizabeth and Emma, prove to be experienced guides and savvy teachers.

Soon, the students are warming up to the task, forgoing any academic drivel and heading straight to the loin of the matter, exchanging aperçus on the order of, “Emma and Mr. Knightley, you just never feel the sex.” Alert the ghost of Northrop Frye – there's a PhD thesis lurking in that insight. Thus enlightened, the book-clubbers sally forth from each literary vigil determined to settle their own disordered lives. Since their numbers are many and the clock is ticking (four novels down, just a couple to go), speed is of the essence even for this bunch of slow readers. Blind husbands must have their epiphanies, proud wives must swallow their resentment, eager singles must be paired up, that skydiver must be brought back to earth, all before the final page is turned. In short, the movie's brace of happy endings are in a race with Jane's.

Faced with this challenge, writer-director Robin Swicord marshals her cast efficiently and displays a nice light touch. However, material so precious is awfully fragile, and she can't do much to hide the cracks. Still, cracks and all, The Jane Austen Book Club could be the start of a genre. Or at least a parlour game. How about The Franz Kafka Book Club – five depressed guys and a femme fatale hunt down cockroaches while misusing the word “Kafkaesque.” The Oprah Winfrey Book Club – Jonathan Franzen runs roughshod through chain stores defacing Oprah stickers wherever he finds them. The Dan Brown Book Club – six readers fight for three life jackets in a desperate struggle not to drown in the risible plot. The list goes on. See you at the salon.

The Jane Austen Book club opens today in Toronto and across Canada on Oct. 5.