Romance-19^th Century Style-The Film Adaptation Of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (2007)-A Review  

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Northanger Abbey, starring Felicity Jones, JJ Field, based on Jane Austen’s novel, 2007 

Those readers who have followed me in this space or in the American Film Gazette know as with my predecessor in this space, Sam Lowell, that we tend to go for broke when we get around an idea or that interests us and find every possible connection. That is the case here with the Masterpiece film adaptation of 19^th century English novelist Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (not the original working title or published title but what has come down to us).Perhaps not so strangely the genesis of this review lies in a previous review of The Jane Austen Book Club a film which took a modern look at romance in all its various manifestations by mimicking Jane’s six major novels as part of monthly book club selections. That film automatically got me thinking that while I had read some of Austen’s novels (later in life because as a young man Austen’s work had the “knock” of being “girl books” and hence off-the-charts for guys, guys around my growing up working class neighborhood anyway) my main knowledge of her work was through various film adaptations. That got me on the road, what will be the continuing road, of reviewing all the film adaptations of her work, or at least the best versions. Northanger Abbey since it is based on Jane’s first novel (although not the first published which would not occur until after her untimely death) leads off here.         

That girl’s book author “knock” mentioned above at a younger age would have thrown me off this film completely (except if I had had a hot date with a girl who was seriously interested in Jane Austen novels and I would have played along feigning interest for obvious reasons but that is a separate story. This effort is centered on the romantic fantasies of a young well-brought up and educated country estate girl, Catherine, played by Felicity Jones and her devotion to the gore, mayhem and, well, sexual attractions of then popular Gothic novels. I would not have been able on my own to overcome Austen’s attempts mock the genre when younger and it was a close thing as I watched here as well.         

Here’s the thrust of what Austen was trying to get at in her never-ending look at the mores and social customs of early 19^th century England when it was becoming a big-time world power. Young Catherine gets an opportunity to break out of the cloistered country estate life and head to Mayfair swells Bath along with a local magnate and his wife. While there she is introduced to all the charms and hypocrisies of upper-crust English life which puts something of a crimp in her vivid imagination of what such life entailed gleaned from the plots of those feverish pot-boiler Gothic novels her budding sexuality was forcing on her imagination. The long and short of the matter though is that she met one Henry, a younger son of the magnate of Northanger Abbey. They were almost immediately smitten with each other through a series of encounters. Encounters encouraged by Henry’s father a classic old-time gold-digger who believed, incorrectly it turned out, that Catherine had come from wealthier circumstances than was actually the case.             

That father’s search for “gold” and the increasing attraction between Catherine and Henry is what drives the major part of the film. Naturally as with all of Austen’s novels there are side stories, stories such as the one about a perfidious young woman who supposedly loved Catherine’s brother, the seduction and abandonment of that woman by Henry’s Army officer older brother and her eventual return to the brother. Naturally as well there are plenty of misapprehensions about motives and gestures as Catherine’s vivid Gothic novel-driven imagination draws conclusions about the possible murder of Henry’s mother by the father. It was a close thing but in the end Henry and Catherine are reunited and wed once it became clear that Henry’s father’s real motives toward his wife, and with Catherine, were to grab as much dough as possible from whatever arrangement could be made. A classic Romantic era novel with a close following of the novel storyline by the film.