No prejudice against this gentle tribute to Jane Austen

The Jane Austen Book Club is such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler's 2004 bestseller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.

After all, aren't novels that fall under that noxiously condescending rubric contrived to reassure readers by offering them second-hand problem-solving advice? Like it or not, Jane Austen is a rock on which the genre was founded. So why shouldn't a novel and the movie adapted from it acknowledge the connection in a way that is smart and amusing as well as comforting?

A tightly knit ensemble piece directed and written by Robin Swicord, the film adroitly shuffles nine characters (five women and four men) and throws in a too-brief cameo by Lynn Redgrave as one woman's dissipated, post-hippy mother.

You can question the story's conceit that the novels of Austen are an ideal guidebook to personal fulfilment for the modern American woman. But as the members of a Jane Austen reading group, who live in Sacramento, analyse the behaviour of the characters in her novels, the movie is also a savvy course on how to read a novel of manners. If that novel has any depth, the characters' motives are open to interpretation.

Is a knight in shining armour really Mr Right? Does a happy ending really augur happily ever after? What are so-and-so's real motivations?

For these likable women and the one man who joins their group, which meets monthly to discuss a different Austen novel at each session, Austen's books serve as mirrors and Rorschach tests in which the members recognise themselves and their romantic peccadilloes.

The movie glamorises Fowler's characters in ways large and small. Several are a decade younger in the film than in the book, and all are attractive. Grigg (Hugh Dancy), the lone man, has been transformed from a temp in a university linguistics department in his 40s into a cute-as-a-button Silicon Valley techie and possible genius in his early 30s. Having grown up with three older sisters, this puppyish man-child and science-fiction fanatic who compares an Austen novel to The Empire Strikes Back is charmingly feminised without being effeminate.

Bernadette (Kathy Baker), the group's founder, is a six-times-married dynamo in her mid-50s who is both free-spirited and maternal.

Her close friend Jocelyn (Maria Bello), a control freak and dog fancier who breeds Rhodesian Ridgebacks, fancies herself above the human mating game.

The main plot involves Grigg's unrequited passion for Jocelyn, who invites him into the group as a potential boyfriend for Sylvia and keeps trying to throw them together, never realising that she herself is the one he wants. Her unlikely naivete and his unlikely shyness gives the movie an Austen-like narrative gloss.

Like the other movies and television projects in a Jane Austen boom that continues to gather momentum, it is an entertaining, carefully assembled piece of clockwork that imposes order on ever more complicated gender warfare. - © (2008) New York Times