"Book club" characters find themselves in Jane Austen

Full disclosure: I belong to a book group, and in our many years of meetings we have been known to read and discuss Jane Austen. So, in theory, my friends and I should be falling all over "The Jane Austen Book Club," right?

Such, presumably, was the thinking behind this movie. Karen Joy Fowler's novel "The Jane Austen Book Club," when I read it a few years ago, struck me as a smart author's calculated attempt to reach a guaranteed audience; the book felt well-crafted but soullessly generic. Robin Swicord's movie feels the same way — the cast is well-chosen and everything looks inviting and pretty, but things never rise above the competent chick-flick level.

In the story, faithfully adapted for the screen, five women and one man form a book group for the purposes of reading Jane Austen and find that the events of Austen's novels have uncanny resonance in their own lives. Each character has her own quirk: Bernadette (Kathy Baker) is the earthy one; Jocelyn (Maria Bello), the bossy one; Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), the bitter one; Prudie (Emily Blunt), the pretentious one; Allegra (Maggie Grace), the not-too-swift one; and Grigg (Hugh Dancy), the guy, who's sort of like the book-club mascot.

They talk about the books (which mostly involves talking about Austen's characters and how they feel about them), experience life traumas and resolve them with the neatness of an Austen novel.

It's not at all unbearable to watch: Bello and Blunt, in particular, find some depth in their characters, and those who've read a lot of Austen will have fun playing spot-the-reference. But there's nothing here that's even close to the fun of reading or of a good book-group meeting of your own. And I can't help wondering how Austen herself might feel about this seemingly endless cinematic and literary fascination with her works. Are the Brontës and George Eliot jealous, glaring at her from their own section of that literary heaven where they all reside? Now that's a book-club discussion I'd like to hear.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com