When
tackling Jane Austen’s unfinished early novel Lady Susan, Whit Stillman stripped away the epistolary structure,
but the characters’ desire to dish remains as strong as ever. In ostensibly
polite London society, nobody is a bigger cause and purveyor of gossip than
Lady Susan Vernon. Her scandals will be inhaled and savored in Stillman’s Love & Friendship (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Lady
Susan and her long-suffering daughter Frederica have just been evicted by their
hosts, Lord and Lady Manwaring for reasons we can quickly deduce. It is fair to
say Lord Manwaring is sorry to see her go, but go she must. The Vernons
temporarily find shelter with Lady Susan’s closest friend Alicia Johnson, a
former American Loyalist. Of course, her fuddy-duddy husband does not approve
of such a wicked woman, so she arranges a long term residency for them in
Churchill, the estate of her good natured brother-in-law, Charles Vernon and
his rightfully wary wife Catherine (of the prominent DeCourcy family).
True
to form, Lady Susan immediately vindicates her suspicions by bedazzling her highly
eligible younger brother Reginald. Although he fancies himself a worldly
fellow, he is no match for Vernon’s charms. Simultaneously, Lady Susan doggedly
pursues a match for Frederica with the Vernon-DeCourcys’ neighbor, the
ridiculously wealthy and downright ridiculous Sir James Martin. Such a prospect
alarms Frederica’s hosts, igniting a battle of wits and manners.
Frankly,
you might want to jot down some notes to keep the large cast of characters
straight, but it hardly matters. Stillman’s dialogue is so deliciously witty
and cutting, it is always a pleasure to hear and it usually reveals Lady Susan’s
attitudes towards her respective conversation partners in spades. Late
Eighteenth Century England might have been a man’s world, but they are
completely out-classed by the infinitely cannier women, with the constantly scheming
Lady Susan standing in a class by itself.
This
is indeed Lady Susan’s story and what a role it is. Fortunately, Kate Beckinsale
plays it to the hilt, luxuriating in every caustic barb and seductive glance.
Finally, she lives up to the promise of her 1990s work, in such films as Much Ado About Nothing, Cold Comfort Farm,
and Stillman Last Days of Disco.
Where has she been for the last eighteen years, besides Stonehearst Asylum, Pearl Harbor, and the Underworld franchise? It is good to have her back, commanding the
screen and all the silly men around her as such a flamboyant but razor sharp
character.
Most
everyone wilts next to Beckinsale’s Lady Susan, but not Tom Bennett, who
remains defiantly chipper as the utterly clueless Sir James. He raises upper
class buffoonery to a high art form. Wisely, Chloë Sevigny opts for the
understated approach as Johnson, the American Tory, quietly tossing in sly gibes
to complement Beckinsale’s Bette Davis-like turn.
