It all ends up pretty much as expected and yet also manages to take you by surprise. Reputations are at stake, along with innocent hearts and large sums of money. Callers are received, letters are opened, gossip is breathlessly exchanged and long walks are taken on beautifully manicured lawns. Visiting the estate of her sister- and brother-in-law, (Emma Greenwell and Justin Edwards), Susan meets a dreamboat named Reginald (Xavier Samuel), who is both her perfect match and a wildly inappropriate choice.Īs it must in any decent Austen adaptation, the story more or less takes care of itself, as the action shuttles between London and various country houses. Frederica has caught the eye of Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), described in an onscreen note (and later aloud) as “a bit of a rattle,” which is Regency slang for blithering idiot. When she is not keeping illicit company with the handsome, silent and emphatically married Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearain), the nearly penniless Susan is looking for a pair of husbands, one for herself and one for her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark).

The lavish costumes and lovely real estate - requirements of the genre - are offset by a fizzy, giddy mood of spirited preposterousness. There is plenty of low comedy as well, a bracing silliness that places Austen in the line of British humor that extends through P.

Stillman’s script accordingly abounds in rapid-fire sallies of verbal wit that require and reward maximum alertness.

It’s the Whit Stillman movie that some of us have been waiting a long time for, and also a Jane Austen movie that goes some way toward correcting the record of dull and dutiful cinematic Janeism.īased on an early, little-known epistolary novella called “Lady Susan,” “Love & Friendship” is a reminder that Austen was not only a brilliant architect of screen-friendly plots but also a very funny writer.

I’m happy to report, in any case, that the release of “ Love & Friendship” mitigates both the shortage and the surfeit. I refrained from starting that sentence with “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” because it isn’t, and also because that would have been too obvious a way of calling attention to the Austen glut and its attendant clichés. In the past quarter-century or so, there have been too many Jane Austen movies and too few Whit Stillman movies.

Love and friendship review new yorker