I’m not familiar with Jane Austen’s posthumously published novel, Lady Susan, retitled here as Love and Friendship, but the film is enjoyable enough for me to want to read it. Still, despite a powerhouse performance from Kate Beckinsale – as gorgeous as ever, especially in that purple gown – there is an “unfinished” quality to it that somewhat blunts the pleasure.

Whit Stillman, who adapted and directed the film, re-united the stars of his The Last Days of Disco, Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny, although Sevigny, who was the lead in the earlier film, is in a drab supporting role here.

The setting is rural England and London in the 1790s. Beckinsale plays Lady Susan Vernon, a late-thirties widow with a teenage daughter. Fiercely determined to preserve her upper class lifestyle, she surmises that marriage to wealth is the only way to do it, and she sets her cap for Reginald (Xavier Samuel, very good), her younger, rich brother-in-law, as her future husband. She descends on her sister-in-law’s estate, where he is on an extended visit, in order to make the conquest, but the plan is unexpectedly disrupted when her daughter, Frederica, runs away from school to join her. Fearing that the lovely teenage girl may prove a rival for Reginald’s affections, she arranges the girl’s marriage to an older landowner, Sir James Martin, who is, to put it politely, a total moron. But, as she explains to her friend, Alicia (Sevigny), an American married to a wealthy landowner, this is unimportant when you look at the size of his estate. Alicia becomes her willing co-conspirator, especially since Susan can help her to preserve her strained marriage and avoid being sent back to America (horrors!).

The dialogue is often witty and sharp, but the filming of it is not. The camera too often stays fixed on frozen groupings of people bantering until the shot fades into the next scene. Beckinsale just keeps on nattering, effortlessly defeating every obstacle, leaving the other characters bug-eyed in shock at her brazenness. The music, too, is rather stately and altogether joyless when it could have added a much needed brightness to the story. John Addison’s score for Tom Jones is a great example of delicious comic punctuation.

Part of the problem may be that this is a dialogue and plot-driven film, and there’s just too much plot to drive – at least not in the way Stillman has chosen. The first twenty minutes are a chore because too many characters are introduced, and you have to work hard to keep track of them. True, the payoff is there once you’re hooked into the story, but the confusion lingers.

There are also bothersome technical problems. IMDB lists two locations for filming, neither in Britain but in Dublin. Well-preserved landmarks of an earlier era, they’ve been used as film locations before. In fact, another house on the same street – Great George Street – was used in filming Becoming Jane Austen, in 2007. I only mention it because there’s a trade-off when you use real locations for interiors instead of studio sets. Here, the lighting and sound-recording were less than ideal. The former was often dank, the latter somewhat muffled. Post-production was not perfect. I was reminded of Michael Palin’s film bio of one of his ancestors some years ago, a disaster. Technicals are better here, but cutting back on real production values always shows.

Finally, something else bothered me, and the only word I can think of to describe it is “sparkle”. Part of the fun in period comedies is seeing how people struggled with the proprietary restrictions. Many subjects were considered “improper” for civilized discussion, and sex certainly topped the list. But the classic English comedies-of-manners, like Kind Hearts and Coronets or the film of The Importance of Being Earnest, showed the strain of having to suppress such feelings, often to devastating comic effect. To some, this kind of acting is hammy, overdone. The best of those films, however, sustain a delightful effervescence, mostly due to having supremely talented actors compete with each other for laughs.

Here, while Beckinsale gets almost all the funny lines, the other actors – instead of grabbing the chance to react comically – were rather subdued, possibly because that’s what Stillman wanted from them.

Naturally, the exception is the one that gets the most attention. Tom Bennett’s Sir James is a living cartoon of the clueless twit, straight out of Monty Python. Nobody, not even Beckinsale, could compete when he was on screen, and Stillman did not hold him back. Yes, sometimes “silly” can be the most fun. I wonder, in fact, if Stillman might want Bennett to play this character again, perhaps by launching him into the modern world from a time machine.

I should also mention the talented, bird-like Jenn Murray, who gets to shine in one hysterically funny – funnily hysterical? – scene. Watch for it.

As I’ve said about another recent film (Johnny To’s Office), sometimes you feel the characters are not worth your time, and this holds you back from enjoying the story. But the story here is fresh and surprising, with layers of cynicism based on historical truth, so you do care how it’s resolved even without liking the characters. Beckinsale’s Susan is not merely unlikeable, she’s a monster; as cold-blooded in her way as Hannibal Lechter. Still, her single-minded pursuit of wealth through marriage has a certain logic to it, at least in relation to economic realities. She’s only exploiting  the most rewarding opportunity for women that society had chosen to provide at that time.

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