Love & Friendship/The Family Fang
Whit Stillman’s brisk adaptation of Jane Austen’s little-known novel Lady Susan finds the writer/director far removed from his 1980’s films of just-privileged-enough young people figuring it out. Given that Love & Friendship — Stillman’s retitling is apt — departs to such a degree in setting from Stillman’s earlier work it is a pleasure to report that the new film finds the director in confident form. The recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) is on the hunt for a new husband and the financial security that marriage brings. Lady Susan’s quest brings her into the orbit of a sister-in-law (Emma Greenwell) whose own brother (Xavier Samuel) seems amenable to Susan’s advances, but word of the controversial Lady’s involvement with a married man (Lochlann O’Mearain)has preceded her. The world of the film is filled out with Susan’s American confidante (Chloe Sevingy), her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark), and a dim aristocrat (the very funny Tom Bennett) who hopes to make Frederica his wife.
The way that Beckinsale’s Lady Susan bounces between these characters in pursuit of her own security turns Love & Friendship into a riff on social codes, which is of course just where Stillman wants to be. The way that Susan will be received, or not, and the future of Frederica are all subjects for scenes of great comic energy until, at last, one of the many letters written during the film is read by the wrong person at the wrong time. Beckinsale never tires during a succession of scheming scenes, and her private talks with Sevingy are a welcome diversion, but the movie for all its energy makes the character more a spinning top than an actual person. That’s why Susan’s offscreen fate is merely described while Stillman ends the film with Frederica finding a home that makes both emotional and fiscal sense.Lady Susan is surely minor Austen, the characters are broad takes on the ones we know from her major novels, but Stillman has turned her marginalia into tart and very entertaining summer pleasure.
The Family Fang finds two fortyish siblings (director Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman) in various states of dissipation just when their well-known performance artist parents (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett) have either vanished — leaving behind a bloody car — or pulled off their biggest “piece” yet. Bateman and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (working from a novel by Kevin Wilson) want to make a film about the metaphorical killing of one’s parents, but the film trips over itself with obviousness by doing things like including a song called “Kill Your Parents” as a plot point. Much time is also spent on flashbacks to the Fang parents (played younger by Jason Butler Harner and Kathryn Hahn) and their artwork, but the film never convinces that what the Fangs are doing is important or interesting. It’s easy to see how Bateman’s character might have been warped by things like being manipulated into kissing his sister during a school play, but Christopher Walken is so good at playing a very specific type of arrogance that his character must have soured his kids on life in a thousand subtler ways too. Watching Bateman and Kidman play sad and screwed up is fun for a time, but the movie gives them an ending it hasn’t earned and so ends up being a collection of parts that don’t quite cohere.
