Daily Trojan USC.edu

Issue date: 9/19/07 Section: Lifestyle

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Literary lunch | Hugh Dancy and Maria Bello play members of a book club whose burgeoning romance is thwarted by misunderstanding in "The Jane Austen Book Club."

Somewhere between "I'm catching cold because I was covering Emmy night" and "There hasn't been an original movie since 'Memento,'" the flow of dramatic possibility inside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel shifts, almost imperceptibly, in a new direction. Somewhere between discussing the merits of "3:10 to Yuma" and complaining about an upcoming "Polo event," at the crossroads of sleek Voss water bottles and goblets of juice, the thread is lost.

Celebrity culture is easily seen, in these air-conditioned rooms clicking with idle chatter and a multitude of BlackBerrys, to be less the fault of the celebrities than the journalists that cover them.

This is journalism as spa treatment.

But if the frame of reference for the scribes huddled around the table of Suite 709 is the frame of a paparazzo's lens instead of a Picasso painting - a frame in which certain publications prize gossip and blurb over real answers to real questions - the minds behind "The Jane Austen Book Club," which opens Friday, are refreshingly cerebral.

"One of the watchword phrases for me in this film was 'continuous partial attention,' which is from a Thomas Friedman column," said Robin Swicord, the writer and director. "We're focused on everything a little bit, and we sort of live in this fractured state, which makes the focus necessary to read -and the focus necessary to really know one another and to create community - hard to come by."

Jane Austen and Thomas Friedman, for those who've never been to a Hollywood press junket, are not exactly perennial topics of discussion.

But then again, "The Jane Austen Book Club," which frames the lives and loves of five women and one man in contemporary California with the lessons of Austen's own work, is not exactly a perennial kind of romantic comedy.

"The truth is that, ever since that 'Pride and Prejudice' [the 1996 BBC miniseries with Colin Firth], it's been an ongoing thing, and it shows no signs of stopping," said Hugh Dancy, who plays Grigg, the sole man in the book club, about the cinematic popularity of Jane Austen. "I think of this as the meta-Jane Austen. It's not like I'm hoping to do the Jane Austen film that would stop all others, although there would be some advantage, some merit in that … The truth is that all these films being made shows that people in our society are obsessed by her now more than ever."

Dancy, who studied literature at Oxford, possesses a charming, unkempt coyness that offsets the utter flawlessness of his gray blazer, pressed white shirt and gelled twirls of brown hair. He seems almost uncomfortable in his growing fame; his eyes dart around the room, focusing more intently on the warp and weave of the flowered tablecloth than on the questioner's pair of eyes. But Dancy's education and pedigree are obvious. He understands character, and is able to articulate that understanding, better than almost anyone - even inadvertently.

"Buddy, in 'Evening,' is utterly uncomfortable in his own skin," he said when I asked him about playing Americans in both "The Jane Austen Book Club" and this summer's "Evening." "By the end of the story you realize he's just deeply unhappy with who he is, and Grigg was the classic case of someone who's absolutely comfortable in his own skin and not embarrassed by his oddities … Playing Grigg was a nice contrast, a nice antidote, and I didn't even stop to think about them being American."

But Kathy Baker, who plays Bernadette, the organizer and matriarch of the book club, makes eye contact as few film actors do in these situations. Rather than asking you with her eyes to move along, to keep the flow of autograph seekers going at a steady pace, she attempts to hold your gaze. It's as though she were trying to discover something about you as you try to discover something about her. Quid pro quo.

Her friendliness is no cover for stupidity, however. She is well-versed in Austen's work and, like Dancy, takes the characterization involved in a romantic comedy quite seriously.

"I actually thought Bernadette was quite lonely and insecure," she said of the character's relationship with the other members of the book club. "I think she's a person who puts on a bright face, but actually she goes home at night, by herself, and reads books … I find that she needs the book club more than anybody."

For her part, Baker sees Austen as an older, maybe slightly more buttoned-up version of contemporary concerns.

"She's just compelling. We're sort of in an Austen lovefest these days, since 'Clueless.' [And] it's not just a girl thing. It's love, it's sex, it's hookin' up. We recognize ourselves in her characters."

Too true, even if references to the Keira Knightley version of "Pride and Prejudice" enter the questioning more frequently than any words Austen ever wrote, if the frame of reference shrinks to include only film and celebrity to the detriment of everything else. At the Beverly Wilshire there's no suggestion that any of the journalists have read much Austen, but they've certainly seen the movie.



- Read Matt Brennan's review of "The Jane Austen Book Club" in Friday's Lifestyle.

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