Starring Keri Russell and Jennifer Coolidge. Rated G.

When British journalist Caroline Criado-Perez succeeded in her campaign to ensure that Jane Austen succeeded Charles Darwin on the 10-pound note, she was thanked for her seemingly uncontroversial trouble by a steady stream of rape and death threats. If that’s where we’re at today, perhaps there is some incentive for modern gals to be transported back to the England of 1800.

Austenland addresses this notion by shipping its bland heroine back in time, via an “immersive” U.K. theme park run by the imperious Mrs. Wattlesbrook (Jane Seymour), who hires actors to give the park’s female following a complete romantic package. This particular session is attended only by mousy New Yorker Jane Hayes (Keri Russell), seeking her own Mr. Darcy, and another Yank played by Jennifer Coolidge, here called Miss Elizabeth Charming. The latter hasn’t read Pride and Prejudice, or anything else, but she is besotted by the era’s uniquely unflattering fashions.

Not realizing she bought the crap tour, Jane is stuck in the servant’s wing. But this poor relation still gets to eat mutton and play off the male attentions of a likable Regency ninny (James Callis) and the sullen, enigmatic Mr. Nobley (the oddly named J J Feild, going all Colin Firthish). And she’s distracted by a manly servant (Bret McKenzie) straight out of D. H. Lawrence. Also aboard are Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s ditzy blond niece (Georgia King) and a Jamaican “sea captain” (former footballer Ricky Whittle) who can’t keep his shirt on.

The thinly scripted film is an unimpressive directing debut for Jerusha Hess, who cowrote Napoleon Dynamite with her husband, Jared Hess. She depends on the cast to sell her Austentatiously corny material—successfully, in the cases of Coolidge and King, less so with Russell, who has little charisma. This drab comedy doesn’t do much for the women of the world, or for literature, but it does come to life in brief, anarchically staged glimpses of the fake suitors backstage. Those wildly funny moments, at least, were worth every pound spent on them.