The premise sounds ripe for Christopher Guest: Let’s follow a naive young woman on her dream vacation to an immersive, role-playing theme park that brings alive the world of Jane Austen novels. Here be proud young men, haughty dowagers, and drawing rooms with tea—a Comic-Con for BBC addicts. But Guest isn’t doing this kind of projects anymore, and the actual execution of Austenland falls along much more conventional lines. Our heroine is Jane (the role’s a blank, but Keri Russell does her best with it), whose life-size cardboard cut-out of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy just isn’t enough to fill her Pride and Prejudice fantasy. She arrives at Austenland at the same time as a rich lady called Elizabeth Charming—the visitors all have vaguely Austenish names—played by the irrepressible Jennifer Coolidge, a veteran of Guest’s comedy troupe. I am grateful nobody repressed Coolidge, because her blowsy vocal delivery and unfiltered one-liners give Austenland its main source of oomph.
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