Movie Review: Lost in Austen

I was thiiiiis close to just re-watching Clueless or writing about the Sense & Sensibility that I slept through half of for my last title in the Everything Austen Challenge, but I manned up and watched the 3-hour long Lost in Austen miniseries. Three hours...so daunting. But I'm so glad I decided to discover something new!

Amanda Price is a Jane Austen addict. Her idea of an excellent evening is sitting at home in a bathrobe with a bottle of wine reading Pride & Prejudice. She's read it so many times that she puts herself in the story and can feel the setting. She's in love with the elegance, the romance, and the custom of Jane Austen's England. But in the real world, she lives with her boyfriend Michael whose idea of romance is drunkenly proposing to her after a night out with the boys. When a girl claiming to be Elizabeth Bennett mysteriously appears in Amanda's bathroom, Amanda naturally believes she's finally cracked and is headed for the nut house. But then this Elizabeth Bennett shows Amanda a portal through the bathroom-wall-turned-door that leads to the very fictional world of the Bennetts in 19th century England. And naturally they have to switch places, right?

This movie was such a romp that I barely even noticed it was three hours long. With Amanda pretending to be a friend of Lizzy's visiting from Hammersmith, she begins to meet the entire cast of Pride & Prejudice and realizes she's entered at the very beginning of the story. But when Mr. Bingley starts to make eyes at her instead of Jane Bennett, Amanda quickly realizes she has to set the story on its correct path, a task that proves to be much harder than she could have ever imagined. The fun thing about this story is seeing how all the characters and events start to change from the original plot because of Amanda's presence. She finds out that there's much more to these characters and their world. No matter how many times she's read Pride & Prejudice, she still doesn't know the full story. 

I thought this a very witty, original story. I had guessed the ending a couple of times before the end but every time, something changed and I had to question my guess. So I'll just say that the ending is somewhat predictable, but you'll go on quite a ride before you get there.