'Northanger Abbey' is lighthearted Austen

Davies has a pleasing way of staying true to his masterful sources in spirit and detail, never imposing a contemporary vision onto them in the way Jane Campion and Laura Jones did in 1996 with "The Portrait of a Lady," by making the Henry James novel into a tale of domestic abuse. And yet Davies knows how to clear off the dust, too, to translate all the 19th-century manners and obscurities for today's audiences. There's a nice scene early in "Northanger Abbey" when heroine Catherine Morland and hero Henry Tilney are talking about flirting while flirting, and Davies makes their clever "meta" exchange - talking about talking - feel like a Victorian invention.

There are things to like about Davies' "Northanger Abbey," even while it is flawed and superficial, particularly when the storyline collapses awkwardly toward the end. It is not one of Davies' most consistent adaptations, but still, it's an easy-to-watch introduction to one of Austen's lesser-known novels. Austen wrote "Northanger Abbey" early in her career but, after a publishing misadventure, it was not released until after her death. About an imaginative young woman who reads too many Gothic novels, the story is Austen's most lighthearted.

Catherine Moreland (Felicity Jones), an impressionable 17-year-old from a large, not particularly wealthy family, is brought into Bath leisure society by family friends. There she meets two very different pairs of siblings. Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan) and John Thorpe (William Beck) are lively and, perhaps, scheming. Eleanor Tilney (Catherine Walker) and Henry Tilney (JJ Feild) are quieter, more mysterious, and more dignified. Having only learned about life through heightened, supernatural novels, Catherine is ill-equipped to parse out the good and the bad in the Thorpes and the Tilneys.

The movie gives us black-and white flashes of Catherine's vivid fantasies - scenarios in which she is captured by thieves, Henry rescues her, and she swoons in quasi-sexual ecstasy and fear. In the novel, Austen is teasing Catherine, and Davies carries that gently mocking tone into the movie through an authorial voiceover that musingly tells us, "Something must and will happen to throw adventure in her way."