Pun Salad

'Twas a chick-flick evening at Pun Salad Manor.

This is a fictionalized exploration of a period in Jane Austen's short life where she needs to decide whether to (a) succumb to societal pressue to marry well; (b) marry for love; (c) to strike out on her own and "live by her pen"; or (d) bust Charles Darnay out of the Bastille. Anyone with a nodding familiarity with Miss Austen's life knows how it turned out, so the element of surprise is gone. But on the way, there's a lot of clever and flowerly dialogue, fancy costumes, and splashy parties.

I gather that a number of scenes and situations in the film are constructed for Austenophiles to sit up and say, "Ohhh, so that's where she got the idea for …" Since my prior Austen knowledge involves dozing through a lot of movies, I could only do a little bit of that. Still fun, though.

Anne Hathaway does a pretty good job of playing Jane; some of the critics didn't think she did a good job with the accent, but it seemed fine to me.