Fun with IMDb: Austen edition (what else?)

The Jane Austen biopic Becoming Jane (due out next year) starring Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen (don't get me started) fictionalizes the true thwarted courtship of a young Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy, played by James McAvoy, the actor who plays Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia. Just picture it. The princess from the The Princess Diaries and the Narnian half-man/half-goat. Great.

The rest of the movie has an odd pedigree. The director, Julian Jarrold, last brought us Kinky Boots, a film from the twee-British-movie-about-a-quirky-small-town-overcoming-obstacles factory. However, further down his list of credits is the excellent TV adaptation of Zadie Smith's White Teeth (which is a definite must-read), among a plethora of other TV jobs. In fact, the screenwriter, Kevin Hood, also has mostly TV credits to his name.

And, to give McAvoy full credit, he's seems to be balancing his Narnia role with meatier fare in high-brow literary adaptations like Atonement, based on Ian McEwan's Booker-nominated, critically-acclaimed novel. Oddly, the film adaptation of Atonement is being directed by Joe Wright, the man who botched up the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice.

This only supports my long-held opinion that the pool of working actors in Britain is quite small, which means that the same actors/actresses pop up in lots of movies. The most extreme case might be that of Victoria Hamilton, who manages to appear in not one, not two, but three Austen screen adaptations in the 1990s. True, blink and you'll miss her as Mrs. Forster in the Pride and Prejudice mini-series, but still. She gets a line.

At any rate, I'm dreading but planning to see Becoming Jane next year and hoping that I don't have an aneurysm in the middle of the movie. Best case scenario is that I leave the theatre ranting rather lying on a stretcher. Who wants to come with me?