Clueless

There was a good movie in here somewhere but sadly I failed to find it. And I looked pretty hard. I watched it twice on DVR and it wasn’t easy. Introduced by some really lovely opening titles and a mood-setting soundtrack, I was hopeful. But the movie was not cohesive. The plots were manifold and all over the place, I didn’t like or understand the heroine, Lilly, and the figure of Jane Austen seemed gratuitous. She appears to Lilly to guide her out of her unhappy professional and personal life but never gives her any useful guidance or good advice. On camera, at least. It was peppered with talk about and references to the beloved author and her books but the character of Jane Austen didn’t seem to have a real role other than for her entertainment value for Jane Austen fans.

Lilly is the president of the local Jane Austen Society. She was born 200 years too late. We know this because of her old-fashioned hairdo, clothes, and vocabulary. Fiddlesticks! Bejabbers! And she says she hates the internet and computers. Apparently, she only likes books if they are made out of paper, although one of her society members only does audiobooks which she seems to have no problem with. She also doesn’t have a problem with using a digital assistant in her home (Play Music!). When we first meet her, she has a meltdown because a book she wants to buy is snatched off the shelf in front of her by a store clerk for an online purchaser who bought it a minute and a half ahead of her. She is mightily and loudly offended. This did not endear her to me. I order all of my books online or download them on my Kindle from the library. On occasion I do buy hardcover books, but certainly not from a new bookstore in person because they wouldn’t have them in stock. So that is bad or I’m a bad person somehow? And this customer was buying a paper book! The second strike against Miss Lillie is the way she treated her long-term boyfriend. After meeting him late for dinner she complains that the pub where she holds her Jane Austen Society meetings is closing down and they might have to disband the Society because of the difficulty of finding a comparable venue. He in turn shares the good news that he has gotten a promotion and will be moving to Chicago. He wants her to come with him as his wife and presents a ring. He points out that nothing is holding her in New York other than a job she hates. Now, he can take her on the longed-for trip to England and she can get back to her writing because she won’t have to work. She takes great umbrage at these two fantastic opportunities because she didn’t achieve them on her own, and he is somehow behaving like “Mr. Collins” which is about the worst insult imaginable. She accuses him of trying to “rescue” her. Fair enough, but other than complaining, what steps is she taking to rescue herself and achieve her goals on her own? Nada. In fact, when she gets home from her date, she throws her almost-finished manuscript in the trash. Turns out that in addition, she doesn’t love him “like that.” Then what the Dickens was she doing with him in the first place?

At work, she meets the store clerk who wouldn’t let her buy her book and it turns out he is a tech mogul and the new owner of that bookstore. The marketing company she works for is supposed to create a campaign to drive customers to his bookstore which will somehow tie people into the app company he created. It’s all very vague and convoluted. But the important thing is he gives an impassioned speech about how he wants to foster a personal human-to-human connection between people who love books and reading and get more people to shop at bookstores. Somehow Lillie curiously interprets this as him wanting to end bookstores altogether because he is a tech guy. She is very hostile towards him even though their mutual attraction is palpable and he really couldn’t have been lovelier towards her. She is resentful about working on his ad campaign even though it is practically tailor made to her own passion for bookstores and books and a huge opportunity for her. She even has a negative reaction when Trevor offers his bookstore as the new home of her Jane Austen Society. She accepts but with very bad grace. I just didn’t get how a supposedly mature woman could be so silly. She certainly was no Elizabeth Bennett.

Interwoven throughout Lilly’s shattered dreams about being an author, her thawing hostility towards Trevor the more she gets to know him, and her bewildering project for his company are her friend Alisha’s romantic problems and misunderstandings. Most of those scenes had no reason to exist other than to invite some vague comparisons to Emma. Queue matchmaking montage.

So what is the role of Jane Austen in all of this, you may ask? Well, nothing really. She comes to Lilly as a kind of imaginary friend or ghost because Lilly longs for her wise advice. She pops in and out of Lilly’s life, teaches her about having tea, gives her dancing lessons, and tells her she doesn’t know how to be happy. Very helpful. They bond over Colin Firth’s Pride and Prejudice and throw popcorn at each other. There are some amusing fish-out-of-water situations. They are united in their disdain for Trevor, who doesn’t deserve the attitude, so no help in the romance department at all. When Lilly finally finishes her manuscript supposedly with Jane’s encouragement (off-screen) Jane submits it to a publisher behind her back because she knows Lilly is too weak to do so. Strangely, Lilly does not resent Jane’s interference and help. But boy, she does get mad at Trevor because when it is accepted for publication, she finds out that he just bought the publishing company and he may have brought her manuscript to their attention. I guess she only doesn’t want to be rescued by men, but ghosts are fine. All is ironed out when Trevor quotes from Persuasion and gets a second chance with her. In the end, she is planning her second novel, though we’re not sure what ever happened to the first one. And Jane goes back to wherever she came from presumably to “help” the next Jane Austen fan-girl. So, irrational heroine, convoluted plot that never really came together, bad editing which I didn’t get into, and a waste of the Jane Austen character. I think Alison Sweeney was miscast. Ben Ayers as Trevor was fine. Acting-wise they both competently did as they were directed. There were some nice sets and a couple of amusing scenes.