Love & Friendship

Directed by Whit Stillman, United Kingdom, 2016

Love & Friendship is a confusing title for this Jane Austen adaptation. There is a Jane Austen short story titled Love and Freindship (yes, with 'e' before 'i') written when she was only 15, but Love & Friendship is actually based on her unfinished novella Lady Susan, written when she was 19 and unpublished during her lifetime. Lady Susan tells, in epistolary format, of a middle-aged widower and social climber with a genius for manipulation. Considering it was written in 1790s England - and by a teenager, no less - Lady Susan is pretty risque. Its main character is an unrepentant schemer, sexually and financially ambitious, who is neither redeemed or overtly punished for her behavior. A tacked-on epilogue resolves the story and spells out Lady Susan's villainy, but up until its final pages Lady Susan is all scandalous wit. Jane Austen mines humor out of the drastic differences between Lady Susan's letters - depending on who she is writing to, her language is all sugary sweetness or politely phrased savagery. That Jane Austen could conceive of this character at such a young age is early proof of her cleverness and insight.

For superficial reasons it might be surprising that Whit Stillman, the oddball director behind Love & Friendship, would adapt Jane Austen. He's an American indie filmmaker, and none of his previous works were period pieces. But he's been making Austen-inspired movies all along. His 90s cult classics Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco are comedies of manners whose privileged characters are intelligent and erudite, but not as wise as they believe themselves, Emma Woodhouses stranded in the late 20th century. Stillman does justice to Austen with his first official adaptation of her work. Their sensibilities work perfectly together - many of the funniest, sharpest lines come straight from the book, but Stillman fleshes out and deepens the story, adding welcome touches of absurdist humor and a much more satisfying ending.

Playing Lady Susan would be an exhilarating challenge for any actress, and Kate Beckinsale absolutely owns the part. Most well-known in America for her role as leather-clad heroine in the action-horror series Underworld, Love & Friendship is a very different kind of project for Beckinsale and she clearly enjoyed the change of pace. It's her best performance since The Last Days of Disco nearly 20 years ago - which is, not incidentally, also a Stillman movie where she gets to show off her sharp comic timing. Lady Susan, described as a "genius of a diabolical sort" and "the serpent in Eden's garden", manages to manipulate every single character at some point in the movie. She knows exactly how to use deliberate language to twist the moral standards of the time and make herself appear appealing or innocent. Beckinsale plays Lady Susan with a quick tongue and a mischievous gleam in her eyes, self-delighted for pulling off her schemes.

Love & Friendship might surprise audiences with how directly comic it is. Previous cinematic Austen adaptations, though not entirely without humor, have mostly been romantic dramas (Clueless excepted). And though her novels are romantic, that side of her work has been overemphasized. Jane Austen is as practical as romantic in her view of couplings - she is always aware of the economic and social necessities men and women had to negotiate, and casts a gently satirical eye on the hypocrisies of upper class English society. Lady Susan in particular is all satire and no sweetness. Love & Friendship captures her cutting wit. For these characters, Lady Susan especially, language is a weapon and armor. Every polite, verbose conversation is a covert power struggle and battle of wills, characters using convoluted rhetoric and slyly (mis)applied moral principles to prove their rightness - or, at least, maintain the appearance of rightness.

Actually, the "appearance of rightness" is what's most important in this society. Even in how it tells its story, Love & Friendship makes clear that reputation is more important than truth to its characters. The most dramatic moments of the story are elided - two marriage proposals involving major characters happen off-screen. We learn about them by characters' discussions after the fact. This might frustrate some viewers hoping for a more dramatically conventional approach, but it's not accidental. What happens in this story is less important than what characters say about it, how they manipulate gossip surrounding events to further their own agenda.

Love & Friendship also makes clear that, for a woman in Lady Susan's place and time, manipulation was sometimes necessary. She's in a dreadful position - a middle-aged widow who, just by how her society is structured, must be entirely reliant on the hospitality of others for her livelihood. She's a proto-feminist in a way, relentless in the pursuit of independence and unabashed about her romantic and sexual ambitions. Her determination is impressive and a direct rebuke to the ingrained sexism of her times, a point underlined by Sir James's speech about the essential differences between men and women (deeply ironic in context). But Love & Friendship does not turn Lady Susan into a hero either - her schemes are clearly not just a necessary evil, but something she enjoys for the sake of it. And through her carefully-worded witticisms Lady Susan often unintentionally reveals her own faults. "Only by one's friends can one truly be known," she remarks sagely. If true, her one real friend, equally unscrupulous American expat Mrs. Johnson, exposes plenty about Lady Susan - as their entire friendship is founded on a shared disdain for everyone else.

Sir James Martin is one of the movie's most inspired embellishments from the book. He's described by Austen as "a bit of a rattle", a vague but apt description that Stillman and actor Tom Bennett take to absurd extremes. Sir James behaves like an alien attempting to communicate with the proper Georgian manners and failing disastrously. Tom Bennett's performance is over-the-top in the best way - the rambling scene where he cluelessly introduces himself is comedy gold. Both Sir James and Lady Susan are indelible comic creations, and both also, though in different ways, expose the hypocrisy of their society. Everyone around Sir James is clearly mortified by his lack of social graces. They only tolerate him because he's wealthy - making clear the values of their world. "He brings a lively new angle to things," they say euphemistically. Many of the foolish things Sir James says are uncomfortably revealing, not least of all his bizarre homily on "the Twelve Commandments". When cautiously corrected by another character that there are, in fact, only Ten, Sir James is delighted. Missing the point entirely, he now wonders which two commandments he can ignore. "Perhaps the one about the Sabbath. I prefer to hunt."

One of the running jokes in Love & Friendship is the ornamental nature of religion among its Anglican characters and their constant botching of the Ten Commandments. Lady Susan shames her daughter with the fourth (or is it fifth?) commandment, "honor thy father and mother". "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is addressed in a brief but telling moment - one these characters break gleefully and often. Sir James's foolishness is just a ridiculous reflection of the more sophisticated, refined foolishness of his society, and his Twelve Commandments gaffe is not just a gag. Religion is just another accessory to this world, which for all its moral posturing is motivated by wealth and status more than anything else.

But Love & Friendship is not all cynicism - in fact, some of Stillman's additions make it gentler than the book. Supporting characters like Lady Susan's guileless daughter, Frederica, offer a counterpoint to the more manipulative and cluelessly privileged characters. Frederica is the only character who seeks out the truth with humility. She visits the local curate looking for answers about how to really honor her mother. The curate's academic, over-zealous demeanor is amusing, but his words offer an alternative worldview to the scheming and complacency surrounding Frederica. He rhapsodizes about "the superb Baumgarten" and his "aesthetic trinity" - "Truth is the perfect perceived by reason, Beauty by the senses, and Good by moral will". I know nothing about Baumgarten or his theory of an aesthetic trinity, but can sense these principles at work in Love & Friendship, particularly the final scene. Lady Susan's schemes have been rewarded with triumph for her - she's now involved in a secret menage-a-trois, one man her desired conquest and the other providing income and blithely unaware of his position. But in spite of all her plots, the other characters have emerged largely unscathed and happy. Frederica and Reginald DeCourcy, both former victims of Lady Susan, are wed and seem blissful. Reginald reads a poem praising his wife's greatest beauty as "virtue", and Frederica (alternatively known as a "Kentish nightingale" or "Surrey songbird") sings "Love Will Find Out the Way", no matter what manipulations try to squash it.

For all its snarkiness and self-effacing humor, Love & Friendship is ultimately gracious and generous. This graciousness is the secret ingredient that makes Stillman's movies - deadpan and wryly postmodern on their surface - not only witty, but unassumingly wise. I always get the sense that he likes his characters, even as he pokes fun of their self-absorption, cluelessness and dishonesty. In the fashion of all the best comedies, Love & Friendship exposes and mocks the nonsense that people are capable of, but by the end all is well (or mostly all - Sir James would disagree if he had any awareness).