As ever the old adage holds true. No matter how good the cast a film will fail if the script is weak. This was. Despite a stellar cast (and one of the great Ian Richardson's last appearances). This was not so much a biopic as a drama constructed from various scenes from Austen's novels. Yes, the lady wrote from life, from her own intimate world but she observed acutely. Of course her characters are based on people she met, knew, or watched but to flagrantly take scenes from her novels and imply these were events in her life takes things just too far.And how on earth could they shoot a film about Austen entirely in Ireland? Where was Bath? Austen lived there for five years and her father is buried there!

This is an imagined semi-biographical story of Jane Austen. It's around 1795, and Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) is a rebellious young woman before her great works. She forms a combative relationship with rogue Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) while her family wants a more aristocratic match in Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox) and stability of money.It's very doubtful that this has much relationship to reality, but it's still a very good movie. Hathaway and McAvoy are great young actors, and they have magnetic chemistry. It's really an interesting way to create an Austen-like story by using her own life. And I do like the ending and the depressing tone no matter how little it has to do with her true life. We must allow for poetic license. I do wish for a faster start to the drama. Once it gets started, there are great performances such as Julie Walters as Jane's mother in addition to the two leads. I like to think of this as a Jane Austen novel that she never got to write herself.

I enjoyed Anne Hathaway in DWP, but her performance here is just awful. Her English accent is horrible. Why do directors insist on always going for stunning beauty opposed to talent and ability? Anna Maxwell Martin should have been cast as Jane. She is a spectacular actress (Bleak House) who can actually speak with a genuine English accent. What an unusual concept: Make certain the actress playing a British woman can actually speak with a true British accent. Anna Maxwell Martin should also have been the choice as the real Jane was average looking - not drop dead gorgeous. What else can I say. Oh, yeah, The plot is completely inane and Jane's love interest (at least at the beginning, I didn't watch the film all the way through) is an irritating annoying little boy. No chemistry and I wanted to punch him in the throat. What I can applaud is the cinematography. Wow. Absolutely gorgeous. That is what the four stars are for.

Having grown up near Steventon, I have to confess I'm not familiar with the mountainous terrain that appears in parts of this film. Luckily I'm sensible enough to recognise that this isn't attempting to be a wholly accurate biographical work. It uses elements of Janes life, people, places etc. in a fairly loose way to construct a plausible work of fiction about how things might have been. Ultimately, unless you were expecting a detailed biographical work, the success of this film isn't about how accurate or inaccurate the depiction, its how well it works as a piece of drama. In my view it worked very well. So well in fact it's difficult to pick out the flaws. It was in the construction of this films Jane, that I think things didn't quite work. The critical factor in determining her future was where this would leave her and her parents financially marrying Lefroy or alternatively marrying Wisley. For some reason this critical and monumental part of the story failed to carry anything like the same sort of weight it might do in an Austen work. It almost got there in several places - the scene where she screams something about "are there no other women in Hampshire" I thought was particularly good, but instead of building and building the drama, here and in several other points throughout the film, things just sort of dissipated. My other criticism (and this may be just a male thing) was the sheer beauty of Anne Hathaway throughout. She is a fantastic actor, her performance and accent were flawless and I believe she deserves to appear in work with far greater artistic merit than generally seems to be her lot. In this role however, and I think largely due to artificial constraints of Jane's characterisation rather than Anne Hathaway's acting, she just wasn't quite ordinary enough. That may seem a strange thing to say about a fictional depiction of one of the greatest writers the world has even known, but it's not about Jane Austen's extraordinary gifts that I mean, its about how mediocre much of Austen's life was, that crucial part of the back story was insubstantial and, possibly because of the characterisation of her parents, not quite believable.