The Jane Austen Book Club (3.5 out of 4 stars)

The wife and I watched The Jane Austen Book Club last night. She gave it a 2.75 out of 4 stars, and I gave it a 3.5 out of 4 stars, which maybe calls into question the claim that it's a typical "chick flick." Or maybe it calls into question my masculinity. Or maybe it just means I have bad taste in movies. Whatever it means, the standard predictions did not apply, because my wife wasn't nuts about it and I was. My wife has also read all of Jane Austen, and I have read none. Nevertheless, I thought it was charming and insightful, though hardly perfect. If When Harry Met Sally is the gold standard for the romantic comedy, then at best The Jane Austen Book Club gets 3.5 out of 4 stars.

The Jane Austen Book Club (JABC for short) is a story about six people (five women and one man) with diverse backgrounds and tastes who decide to start a book club devoted to the reading of Jane Austen's six novels. As the movie progresses, we learn that their lives are starting to look an awful lot like the books they're reading. In the end, people find love and happiness. And I suppose that it is because the formula of the romantic-comedy is so strictly followed in this movie that it led many people to call it a standard, formulaic chick-flick.

But, I thought it was actually very interesting for a different reason, and for a reason unrelated to the romantic-comedy genre. The movie is primarily a story about how stories (and specifically literature), when at the center of our individual lives and at the center of our communal lives, can change us. The six form a book club, and by reading Jane Austen, go in one second from talking about the characters and the plot of the books to the characters and the plot in their own lives. In one scene, a man estranged from his wife is discussing privately a scene from Persuasion and then immediately goes to confessing his own struggles and failures in his marriage. It's almost as if we are to believe that stories provide windows through which we understand our own lives. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas wrotemore or less that narratives provide us with the tools we need to navigate our ethical lives, and nowhere have I seen that better explained and displayed than in this movie, oddly enough.

The movie also has the humility to acknowledge the treasure in stories in the unlikeliest of places. One of the main characters, the sole male member of the club, loves science fiction. He grew up in a household of women, and when he was 10, his father invited him into his study (no girls allowed) and let his son his read his first science fiction magazine. Over time, the science fiction stories would give him safe refuge from his older sisters and the challenges in his life. When he meets Jocelyn, the older woman, unmarriaged champion dog breeder, he immediately begins to pursue her, and he even believes that they would swap favorite authors. He'd read her favorite novels (Jane Austen), and she'd read his favorite science fiction novels (Ursula K. Le Guin is his favorite). He ultimately ends up reading all her favorites; she always has an excuse not to read his. But the excuse is that she doesn't like science fiction, despite having never read any. In the end, when she finally does get around to reading the books he gave her, she learned how wonderful the books were, and at the same time, seems to realize how wrong she had been about him from the start.

It's good to find a movie that takes the power of stories as seriously as this one does. Not too long ago, I had so fully come to believe in the power of stories, and their centrality to our real lives, that I decided that the Church was really meant to be like a book club. We get together and tell one another the stories of the Bible, because telling and hearing the stories changes us. It makes sense of our own lives. It gives us the tools we need to navigate our social existence. It makes us wake up to the stories. There is something to the book club. I was constantly reminded of myself when the French teacher tried to monopolize the interpretation of the book club or dictate what the story meant. Once my wife threw a copy of James Joyce's Dubliners at me because of our differing interpretations of a story, and I always knew it was not because we disagreed, but because I was a jerk. Living in community - you don't know what's going to happen, and you definitely can't control it. Living among a storied people is the same way. The stories, when read faithfully, earnestly and honestly by faithful, earnest and honest people will let loose a wind that can turn over your whole life. This movie was an attempt to tell a more profound story in the packaging of a simple romantic-comedy formula, and I thought it did a good job. It was an ambitious movie, in that sense, and it manages to both be a good romantic-comedy and a good philosophical tract at the same time. Not easy, as you can imagine.