Producers: Laura Rister, Laura Lewis, Katie Holly and Emma Holly Jones   Director: Emma Holly Jones Screenplay: Suzanne Allain   Cast: Freida Pinto, Sope Dirisu, Zawe Ashton, Theo James, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Doña Croll, Naoko Mori, Ashley Park, Divian Ladwa, Sianad Gregory, Paul Tylak and Dawn Bradfield   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: C

All of us might wish that our favorite authors had written more books during their lifetimes, but that’s no reason for even her most rabid devotees to put up with this Jane Austen knock-off, which Suzanne Allain has adapted from her self-published 2009 novel. 

It’s a story of Regency social revenge set in 1818, when the Honorable Jeremiah Malcolm (Sope Dirisu) is considered the most desirable bachelor in all of England.  One young lady with her eye on him is Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), whom he escorts to a performance of “The Barber of Seville” (which, inter alia, actually had its London debut that year).  Unfortunately, though pretty, in conversation Julia demonstrates herself to be rather a ninny, and Mr. Malcolm dos not call her again, so to speak.

Presumably Julia would ordinarily brush it off, since this is her third season without landing a catch, but when she becomes the butt of jokes about Malcolm dropping her, she’s infuriated.  So she recruits Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto), a friend from her days in boarding school (we see them vowing to be BFFs in a prologue in which they’re played as children by Aisling Doyle as Julia and Tia Ann Jain as Selina) to serve as her instrument of vengeance, also enlisting her seemingly scatterbrained cousin Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as an unwilling accomplice.

Cassidy has learned that Malcolm uses a list of requirements against which he judges each candidate for marriage, and Julia intends to coach Selina, a sweet clergyman’s daughter who’s been working as companion to an elderly lady (only recently deceased), to meet every one of them, encouraging Malcolm to ask for her hand before being informed of the deception and publicly dumped.  Selina is reluctant to get involved in such a plan, but reluctantly goes along at Julia’s insistence.

What follows is a fairly typical Austen-like tale of cross purposes, mistaken motives and changes of heart, complete with alternating moments of comedy and romance and an inevitable happy ending.  It’s played very broadly, and the cuteness quality is overbearing, made worse by a music score by Amelia Warner that italicizes every bit of business to extract the desired emotional response. 

It also adds a wide array of ancillary characters to the mix, most importantly handsome Captain Henry Ossory (Theo James), the nephew of that elderly lady Selina tended to so well, who arrives to romance her. But he’s only the start of a parade.  Naoki Mori is Julia’s observant mother, whose eyes indicate her uncertainty about what her daughter is up to.  Doña Croll is Jeremiah’s aristocratic mother, who hosts the ball where Julia intends her scheme to unfold.  Paul Tylak and Dawn Bradfield are Selina’s easygoing, supportive parents and Ashley Park their friend Gertie, an abrasive but wealthy widow whose volubility, piercing cackle and propensity for saying the wrong thing are constant causes of trouble.  And at the lower end of the social spectrum are Julia’s maid Molly (Sianad Gregory) and John (Divian Ladwa), an ever-present footman, who are always ready with a cheeky observation at their employers’ misguided antics.

The color-blind casting is justified by the general handsomeness of the result, though Ashton comes off as a bit too bitchy for the film’s overall tone, and the film looks great, the Irish locations beautiful in Tony Miller’s lustrous lensing and the production design by Ray Ball and costumes by Pam Downe pretty stunning.  Katie Hickey’s editing is stately without becoming static.

As the final act rolls around and all the carefully-prepared plot pieces fall comfortably into place, however, the overlay of Austenesque convention with modern cliché has become too heavy a load to bear.  By the time a carriage-centered equivalent of the rom-com chestnut about running through the railway station or airport to keep a lover from leaving terminal rolls around, it’s evident that “Mr. Malcolm’s List” is nothing more than a contrived sitcom dressed up with nineteenth-century trappings.

Those who watch the movie are, howeer, advised to stick with it through the closing credits, which are periodically interrupted by period-style pastel posters that show what the various characters’ futures hold. There are no real surprises, but then there aren’t many in what’s preceded them either.