I am mystified by the continual popularity of Jane Austen, whose neoclassicism seems to me as outside modern aesthetics as my own. The audience I watched Love and Friendship with laughed a lot more often than I did. But the stiff formality of Austen's times kept the characters speaking in a conversational manner with hands hanging at their sides until they sounded too much the same, and their grammatically pure sentences sounded too literary.
No young actress I can think of since Joan Greenwood of those classic Alec Guinness comedies of the 1950s has shown exactly the right tinge of exaggeration required by comedies of the 18th and 19th centuries. And my favorite, Kate Beckinsale, while completely believable (maybe too much so for this material), with her realistic delivery, is not an exception. The laughs tended to belong to the male leads, whose parts were more broadly written to begin with, with one man trying to calm a hysterical woman with, "Madam, recover your equanimity," and another one unable to remember who came down the mountain with the Twelve Commandments.
I found much more interest, though little comedy, in the appalling and apparently accurate situation of single women in a society that would not let them work and seemed all but ignorant of the concept of romantic love, not to mention sex. Austen's motto seems to have been, "the way of the world-- you must accept it with a smile." And she felt no obligation to believe in happy endings or happy marriage.
Love and Friendship is first-rate entertainment but not as funny as reviews insist, and by no means a rosy view of love and marriage. Friendship... well, that may be a different matter.
