Hathaway, who is almost too pretty for the role, recalls the young Judy Garland, with her panicky stare and cherry lips. McAvoy's sexy, good-bad boy, especially in profile, resembles Bob Dylan in his early troubadour mode. With his taste for booze, bare-knuckle boxing and the occasional prostitute, Tom also suggests a whippet version of the young Albert Finney in Tom Jones.
Not much is known about the actual Austen-Lefroy relationship except that they met at a ball in 1795 around the time she had begun an early novel that was later reworked as Sense and Sensibility and that she described him in a letter to her sister, Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin), as "a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man." At a ball they apparently caused tongues to wag by sharing three dances instead of the regulation two.
The real-life Lefroy eventually married a wealthy Irish woman with whom he sired seven children and became a successful lawyer. The fanciful coda to Becoming Jane imagines a reunion between the grown-up Jane and Tom, now both slightly graying.
The screenplay's pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film. A scene suggesting oral sex between Jane's parents is one. (Ugh!) And after Jane and Tom's first kiss, when Jane coyly inquires about her osculatory technique, you may want to howl.
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