Whit Stillman’s peerless comedies of the 1990s—Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco—feature Americans who are living in their time but are not really of their time. They are all young people, but they are not interested in the things young people were interested in when the movies were made (or, in the case of Disco, in the early 1980s, the time in which it is set). Their lives revolve around good breeding, propriety, and how to behave morally at a time when there are no agreed-upon moral strictures. Their conversations are variations on these themes. Stillman’s heroes want to do what’s right, and in each film they find themselves outmatched by others who are nakedly and unashamedly pursuing their own self-interests.
Stillman’s movies are so original because the comedy in them derives from the dynamic he establishes between these two: the earnest and self-conscious moralists who are tied up in knots by their concern for others and the trickier and more dynamic solipsists who simply apply themselves to getting what they want. These are such universal concerns that Stillman’s movies have not dated at all. They are the only genuine comedies of manners of our age, and that is why they are so beloved.
In his latest film, Love and Friendship, Stillman reaches back two centuries and finds in Jane Austen’s little-known and unfinished novella Lady Susan an eerily perfect piece of source material. Austen’s titular character is a Regency version of Charlotte, the gorgeous underminer who sits at the center of The Last Days of Disco making other people feel bad while making herself feel very good indeed. (After getting caught out in some misbehavior, Charlotte responds angrily, “Anything I did that was wrong, I apologize for. But anything I did that was not wrong, I don’t apologize for!”) Indeed, the same actress—Kate Beckinsale—plays both parts, and she is as casually magnificent in this picture as she was in the earlier one.
Lady Susan, a newly minted widow whose husband has left her penniless, wreaks havoc on three households as she wanders about England imposing on other people while she tries to find a new financial path for herself. Her great joy is in seducing men for sport, through both her great beauty and her extreme cleverness. She disturbs the marriage of the Manwarings at Langford. She moves on to her brother-in-law’s house at Churchill and sets her cap on his brother-in-law, 12 years her junior. And in London, Lady Susan’s association with a fellow conniver named Mrs. Johnson threatens the latter’s marriage of convenience to a gouty, elderly gentleman who refuses to die conveniently, as both Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson most heartily desire.
Aside from Mrs. Johnson (and the adulterous Mr. Manwaring), everyone in the proceedings is meticulous about behaving properly and with scrupulous fidelity to the well-established code of conduct of the day. It is the particular genius of Lady Susan herself that she walks the walk and talks the talk while bending both to her own ends. That she is a devil, there is no doubt; but no one can quite catch her out in her deviltry because she is such a master of hewing to the forms.
Lady Susan sounds very dark, in the manner of the Marquise de Merteuil, the antiheroine of Choderlos de Laclos’s great 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses. Like Lady Susan, Laclos’s book is an epistolary novel and, indeed, might have served as an inspiration for Austen’s jape. But where Laclos sees tragedy in the way his aristocrats knowingly subvert the established social order by using its rules as a weapon against the innocent, Austen finds high, rich, and unsentimental comedy.
So does Stillman. Love and Friendship is the funniest movie he has ever made and the most breezily confident. Clocking in at a mere 92 minutes, Love and Friendship does not dwell on the magnificence of its surroundings and its costuming, like other period pieces. It gets a move on.
Stillman’s brilliance with dialogue is demonstrated by the way he fleshes out the character of Sir James Martin, a rich man whom Lady Susan wishes to pair off with her horrified teenage daughter Frederica. In the book, all we learn of him is that he is “silly” and says the same thing many times. Stillman has written two monologues for a transcendently funny actor named Tom Bennett laden with ignorance, solecisms, and boneheaded infelicities that constitute a high-water mark in the comic portrayal of stupidity on screen. I haven’t laughed this hard during a movie in years.
Stillman also takes a few minutes to include a peroration by a local curate on the meaning of the commandment to honor thy father and thy mother—a key moment in the film because it is the only time in which Lady Susan’s usually successful efforts to twist the meaning of things to her own advantage is countered by true and heartfelt words of wisdom. Like all his films, Love and Friendship is, in the end, the work of a genuine moralist—but a moralist unsullied by didacticism or preachiness and genuinely amused rather than horrified by how difficult people find it simply to be good.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
