*Spoiler Alert*
I have to admit, to begin, that I have a fearful crush on Ms. Hathaway. I frequently joke with my friends that there are only four reasons to see a movie today, and she is one of those ladies. So, it's a little curious that I so frequently don't like the movies she's in. The Devil Wears Prada, for instance, left me in a bad mood for days and inspired me to shave daily for several weeks to be as unlike one particular male character as possible. One gets the impression that she conscientiously chooses films with an eye towards responsible messages, which is commendable even if the "responsible messages" she chooses are often poorly chosen, which is frustrating.


I found parts of this movie just as frustrating. Accepting that this is not a biography, but a fictionalized, speculative "biography", which has its own problems but which I'm willing to accept because, frankly, she's so purty, there are pieces that I feel are not well connected with the times. Her hopes of love and marriage are thwarted by a letter to a judge whom is her lover's patron. This judge is enamored with property rights, and several jokes are made at this expense. What seems to go unrecognized is that this advocation of property rights, in that day and age, would make him a follower of Pitt the Younger, the young prime minister that was the first implement the reforms recommended by Adam Smith in favor of capitalism over mercantilism. It's not accident that Pitt the Younger was such a friend of William Wilberforce, the great advocate for the elimination of the slave trade. In fact, I don't know if Pitt the Younger was the one to do this, but it was in the tradition of the reforms affected by these two that the greatest naval force in the world, the British Navy, set up a blockade of the African continent to stop the slave trade, not only the Americas, but to the Middle East and beyond. The British government used its influence in trade and colonies to stop the slave trade throughout most of the planet by the end of that century. And it's no accident; slavery was opposed as a violation the primal element of any human's property: their own body.

But we can accept such a man, advocating such liberal ideas publicly while despising them privately. However, it's not as if the hero and heroine were doomed if they married and yet had the uncle's blessing; the hero could certainly have completed his training as a lawyer and made the same living that he had been planning to make before. There should not have been in conflict. No, we are to believe that "property rights" are the stuff of duffers and close-minded people. And yet this galling fact remains: their love was not defeated by the uncle, nor by the letter written to the uncle, nor discrimination against her as a woman. Indeed, she was proposed to a number of times and, while her family's pressure on her was for the sake of material prosperity, every man who proposed to her loved her, for her mind and accomplishments and never for any pretensions of her wealth. No, she and her great love were defeated, in the end, by their dependence on the uncle, without which they could have told him to jump off a bridge, gotten married, and lived happily ever after. But the hero was, truly, dreaming and impossible dream when he proposed that he could rise without his uncle. His uncle was of a class of people that became judges, where the hero was of a class of people that could only become lawyers. He couldn't rise, because the class barriers were too great and the need for connections too important and merit counted for so little.


This, I imagine, is frustrating to one who desires passion, like the young Ms. Hathaway. There is little to get excited about in the study of property rights, the progressive vs. regressive income tax, and capital gains. But that's the rub: why should it be? Passion belongs to the people, passion belongs to young lovers, defying the world in order to take a flyer on each other. Discussions of politics, which ideally consists of discussions of policies, should be dull, because the government is not entitled to the great glory and honor of courage and love; that belongs to the people themselves. Only then can greatness rise in its best, unadulterated form.

This may all be unfair; my passions seem to have run away with me. I actually did like the movie as a whole. I was wary throughout of Hollywood, but it never once confused love with lust. There were a number of discussions of how restraint was an important part of wealth, which I enjoyed, actually, because that's true. In the end, it showed that restraint was also an important part of love, too, which is also true. I'm not scholar enough to know how faithful this was to her life, but I know that I'm a great fan of Ms. Austen's work, and it was quite faithful to me.