Stream It Or Skip It: ‘An American in Austen’ on The Hallmark Channel, Where A Modern Woman Gets Sucked Into ‘Pride and Prejudice’ And Threatens To Ruin The Entire Plot

Loveuary continues on the Hallmark Channel with the latest Jane Austen-inspired movie, An American In Austen, about a woman who fantasizes about ending up with a Mr. Darcy-type… only to be thrust into the pages of Pride and Prejudice to become the object of the real Mr Darcy’s affection. And it turns out, he’s not the man for her. And then, as she helps the Bennet sisters try to find husbands, she realizes she’s changing the entire plot of the novel and threatening everyone’s happy ending.

AN AMERICAN IN AUSTEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown runs through a lush green field. A narrator explains, “There she was, running for her life…As she fled, each step seemed to take her away from any memory of where she was headed. Running… running…. running…” and the running woman stops and breaks the fourth wall to ask the narrator, “Do you even know where you’re going with this?” The running woman is our main character, Harriet, and she’s a novelist. The scene we’ve just watched is a scene from the novel she’s writing, but she can’t seem to shake her lack of direction.

The Gist: Harriet (real name: Eliza Bennett, is this good casting or what?) is a librarian and aspiring author. She’s been seeing a great guy named Ethan (Bert Seymour) for three years, but when he proposes (in front of all of her friends), she’s conflicted, and the best she can do is tell him, “Maybe.” As great as Ethan is, she’s holding out hope for a man like Mr. Darcy who can sweep her off her feet and make her feel all the things, is that too much to wish for? As she gets into a cab to go home from the proposal, she notices a (magical) shooting star, and then she nods off and when she awakens, she’s inside a horse buggy, and getting dropped off at a grand English estate.

She’s greeted by an entire family who have been expecting her: The Bennets of Hertfordshire! Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters, Jane, Lizzy, Lydia, Kitty, and Mary greet “cousin Harriet from America,” their guest of honor, and Harriet believes the whole thing to be an elaborate prank staged by Ethan, some kind of Ren Faire/cosplay situation. She goes along with it, cynically remarking how perfect and specific all the details of the home are to the Regency era, and complimenting everyone on their commitment to the bit.

Soon enough, she realizes that she’s actually in the plot of Pride and Prejudice. After her arrival, she’s taken to a party where’s she’s introduced to Mr. Bingley and a standoffish Mr. Darcy. But she goes off script, chastising Darcy and telling him how much she’s always hated this part of the book and his aloof treatment of Lizzy.

Soon, she starts predicting what she knows will happen to each character: she warns that Jane will catch a cold on her way to visit Mr. Bingley, she tells Lizzy that Caroline Bingley will make rude comments about her when she arrives all muddy to the Bingley house… and soon, she tells Lizzy and Jane she’s from the future and she knows exactly what will happen to them and who they will marry. The problem is that Harriet, like every woman in a film like this, has always longed for a Mr. Darcy of her own, and the Mr. Darcy in this tale, the one who’s supposed to end up with Lizzy, is attracted to Harriet’s feisty, witty behavior, and she threatens to throw the whole story as she knows it off course. Everything that’s supposed to happen in the story doesn’t, as if Harriet is triggering a butterfly effect, where every interaction she has triggers a shift in the story and no one ends up with their intended betrothed.

Harriet wishes on a star to return home – to the real world, that is – but finds herself deeper and deeper into this Pride and Prejudice multiverse where nothing is going right and she’s realizing that the man she left back home is actually everything she was looking for all along.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The premise is a mash-up of time travel/fantasy films like Back to the Future, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, and The Wizard of Oz, where a modern character is transported to another time and place, though while those are all more adventure tales, the hero’s journey of An American In Austen is more of a romantic comedy.

Our Take: I’ve had the chance to watch all of Hallmark’s Jane Austen-inspired films that have been released (or have yet to be released) this February, and An American In Austen is easily the best of the bunch. On paper, they all sound… basically like the same movie. In the previously released Love & Jane, a hopeless romantic who is a writer (also with writer’s block!) is visited by the spirit of Jane Austen to help her find a creative spark and her very own Mr. Darcy. In Paging Mr. Darcy, a Jane Austen scholar (who is an independent “I don’t need a man”-type, let’s say she has a case of “lover’s block”) regrettably finds herself at a Jane Austen convention where she gives herself over to the whimsy of it and – you can see where this might be going – she falls for her very own Mr. Darcy. And now in An American In Austen (which is produced by the former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson) a writer with a creative block can’t decide if she wants to marry he real-life boyfriend, and when she’s thrust into the fantasy world of Pride and Prejudice, she finally has a chance to fall for her very own Mr. Darcy… but instead, she balks at him and realizes that the man of her dreams was her boyfriend all along. (If you’ve also been watching all these Hallmark movies this month, be on the lookout for Easter Eggs that reference the other movies, like the copy of Pride and Prejudice that Harriet holds in her hand at the beginning of this film, with a foreword written by Victoria Jennings, one of the characters in Paging Mr. Darcy.)

It’s kind of remarkable that three films with similar plots that are all inspired by the same piece of literature can be so tonally different, but An American In Austen succeeds more than the others in part because it has a lot of fun making fun of everyone’s obsession with Mr. Darcy. It’s played as a farce in a lot of ways, but a modern, snarky one filled with Taylor Swift references, jokes about being from the future, and Harriet putting all of the insufferable characters like Caroline Bingley and Mr. Wickham in their place.

Most of the credit for the film’s humor goes to Eliza Bennett who is juggling being her actual character, Harriet, and trying to pretend that she’s this new character, Cousin Harriet, in her favorite novel (a character that actually knows how the whole rest of the book plays out). She never tries to act like she belongs in the Regency period (she gets to blame all her quirks on simply being from America), but she does try to steer the story on the correct course when she realizes that her presence is starting to ruin things for the other Bennet sisters.

While there are tropes, like wishing on a shooting star or being a modern fish out of water, or Harriet using Mr. Darcy as her touchstone of perfect boyfriend material, the real throughline of the film is that Harriet is actually kind of ruining the narrative of the story she’s in. She can’t actually be the Lizzy Bennet of the story because… there already is a Lizzy. Therefore, cousin Harriet’s story becomes less of an homage to Pride and Prejudice and more like Sliding Doors Meets Bill and Ted as written by Jane Austen.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Harriet, back in the real world, professes her love for Ethan and asks him to marry her. He tells her “Maybe.” But then in the next scene, we see that her writer’s block vanished, and she’s giving an author reading of the book she finally completed (with her newly0hyphenated married name on the cover). The book’s name? An American In Austen. This meta onion has so many layers I can’t stand it.

Performance Worth Watching: Eliza Bennett is the reason the movie works as well as it does. No notes.

Memorable Dialogue: “I am destroying Jane Austen,” Harriet says when she realizes that her being a part of the Bennet family is completely throwing off the events of the novel.

Our Call: STREAM IT! An American In Austen is delightful precisely because it is not trying to be a faithful adaptation of Jane Austen, it’s more of a silly, funny critique of people who expect life to imitate art. The film acknowledges that the only Mr. Darcy out there is the one Lizzy Bennet ended up with, and the rest of us, well, we have to love the one we’re with, but that’s not so bad.