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We none of us want to be in calm waters all our lives
I remembered liking Roger Michell's Persuasion (1995). It was my second experience of Austen on film; it was an intervention staged by a friend who had been going to show me Tous les matins du monde (1991) until it came up somehow that I had never seen Ciarán Hinds. It became my immediate benchmark for costume design in historical movies and leads with unusual faces recognized as beautiful. Eight years later, I'd say it more than holds up on these fronts. Plus I recognize more than two members of the cast these days, which is fun.
The premise is a classically Austenian intersection of hearts and economics; the title has a satirical, cautionary twist. Eight years ago, Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) was persuaded against her own judgment to reject a man she loved desperately because he "had nothing to recommend him but himself . . . no fortune, no connections," but now with Napoleon exiled to Elba and the wars seemingly at an end, that same Captain Frederick Wentworth (Ciarán Hinds) is returning to England an eminently eligible bachelor, a naval hero to the tune of £20,000 and so apparently ready to marry that his own sister jokes that "anybody between fifteen and thirty may have him for the asking—a little beauty, a few smiles, a few compliments of the Navy, and he's a lost man." In the meantime, the class-conscious and profligate Sir Walter Elliot (Corin Redgrave, a narcissistic vision in cornflower brocade) has run his family's own fortunes so badly into the ground that he is obliged to repair with his unmarried daughters to chic but less expansive lodgings in Bath and grudgingly let his estate to Admiral Croft (John Woodvine), the Trafalgar veteran whose personal and professional connections are the first step in the chain reaction of reuniting the once-lovers by inevitable social inconvenience, first in the Somerset countryside, then on the shingle of Lyme Regis, and finally in the shops and salons of Bath. We know from the start that Anne's feelings have not altered; she can barely articulate the beloved name without her throat going dry, her face pinched even paler than its usual anonymity. We know nothing about Wentworth except that he is tall, dark, not exactly handsome, and that he has an allergy to high society that would bode sympathetically for the equally private Anne if she could sense in the slightest that he does not despise her for breaking his heart—or worse, feel nothing about her one way or the other, having gotten over his disappointment and moved dashingly on. As she reminds a male friend, "You always have business to take you back into the world." And yet when Anne is footsore and stumbling from slogging all day on damp hillsides in the wake of her married younger sister and an excitable skein of in-laws, the taciturn captain is the first to notice; he hands her up to the Admiral's chaise to ride home instead of tiring herself further and suddenly all the screen is his gloved hand in the moss-colored folds of her cloak at the small of her back, all her awareness that one point of contact, so muffled, so fleeting, and so vital. The film will be intimately attentive to every such moment between them, all the more so because neither of them is given to grand gestures. The clues, if they exist, are minute and double-speaking, constrained by present diffidence as much as painful past. In this carefully monitored environment, even a look can be as galvanic as a shock. A kiss? If the film stock doesn't go up in flames, sure.
A romance that slow and subtly burning has to have actors who can carry every shade of their characters from wounded indifference and resignation to renewed hope and vulnerability and the measure by which Root and Hinds succeed may be my difficulty in thinking of anyone else in either part. The audience can yell "JUST KISS!" as loudly as they want, but the leap of confessing love takes courage, especially love that has been rebuffed or given up for lost. A man of panache and decision at sea who stands around stiffly at parties ashore, Wentworth is so much not his own idea of a romantic hero that he fails to appreciate how he's damn near everyone else's, which makes him a disaster at advancing his own heart's interests—even the false impression of competition can make him quit the field under the misapprehension that he's being tactful rather than an idiot. Anne's reasons for hesitation are thornier, rooted in those eight mute years of watching the sphere of her life shrink to the grounds of Kellynch Hall and the demands of her relations. By an unkind catch-22 of intelligence, she has become at once the family's redundant spinster and its only sensible member, which makes her invisible until needed and unappreciated even when useful. Her father is a red-frizzed dandy who unironically admires his reflection in the table silver while twitting about the disappointing frightfulness of the women one meets in Bath; her sisters are studies in passive aggression, Mary (Sophie Thompson) an expedient hypochondriac given to moaning about her health while motoring her way through breakfast, Elizabeth (Phoebe Nicholls) a fashion plate in everything but expression who appears to subsist, sylphlike, on a diet of sorbet and snubs. Altogether they leave the impression of people who can judge a stranger's social standing down to the micrometer but would fail to find their way out of a paper bag without a full complement of servants to hold lanterns and bear their condescension in silence, and the decisive assurance of their glamorous neighbor Lady Russell (Susan Fleetwood) offers Anne little respite when it steered her so wrong before. She has wasted in their company, so thin and vague that the Empire silhouette settles on her like sheets over the furniture of a shut-up house, her small, self-contained face washed out until its most distinguishing features are huge dark eyes under brows like broken commas. She looks like a lemur—the Roman kind, a starved and dispossessed ghost. It is both a reward and a relief to watch her blossom under the friendship of the Admiral and his wife Sophia (the wonderful Fiona Shaw), whose childless, unbreakable, vividly loving marriage models an ideal of shared life beyond social obligation, as well as the goodwill of her in-laws the Musgroves, who are collectively a little high-maintenance—one twingingly funny scene tracks the round-robin of every family member kvetching to Anne in turn—but sincere in their affection, which extends to mourning that their Charles (Simon Russell Beale) married Mary instead of Anne. Once out of the suffocating isolation of Kellynch Hall, we see that she makes friends warmly and readily, debating the constancy of women and men with the married Captain Harville (Robert Glenister) and matching the melancholic Captain Benwick (Richard McCabe)'s knowledge of Byron and Scott. She begins to dress to her own tastes, even her own advantage. When she studies her face in the mirror at night, she can see the gains of the day, not just pallor. And because Jane Austen in her last novel and Nick Dear in his first screenplay knew that only in Hollywood cliché does a woman take off her glasses and turn into Britain's next top model, Anne never looks a great beauty by the standards of her time or ours, but she becomes beautiful to us with her shy curl of a smile and her steady, deepening eyes, her face no longer so wan and drawn but sure and alive. It is Wentworth's good fortune to benefit from her newfound strength. He is not the reason she grows into it.
Persuasion was originally developed for the BBC as a co-production with WGBH Boston and Millesime and I don't believe it got even an Oscar nomination out of its U.S. theatrical release, but it did win a bunch of BAFTAs, including a well-deserved pair to John Daly for photography and lighting and Alexandra Byrne for costume design. When I say that this movie is my benchmark for historical costuming, I mean that the clothes look like clothes people live and work and travel in, not like showcases for actors in the modern eye, and they are true to the fashions of the time whether anyone looks good in them or not. (Spoiler: quite a lot of people look awful in Empire waists. I worry about the arsenic in some of those brilliantly flashy greens. Puce is less objectionable in person than I had been led to expect and the Musgrove girls are high-spirited in their poppy-bright cloaks, but Elizabeth can at one point be seen sporting a short jacket and tall hat in a color I believe to be evening primrose; it is vibratingly yellow and no friend to her complexion. I admire one of Sir Walter's coats and otherwise wish to hide when I see any of his waistcoats coming.) People's faces are wind-roughened, heat-flushed or cold-pinked; no one's hair is ever perfectly arranged. Even more incredibly, it's not '90's hair, which means that some characters are flattered by Psyche knots and some should hope their ringlets wilt as quickly as possible in the candle-heat of the salon. I am not as good at judging either makeup or lighting, but both certainly look minimal to natural to me. Days are luminous with rain; dinners are dramatically low-lit. Lyme is full of buffeting sea-breeze and haze and strong soaking sun. A rainy day in Bath makes the Elliots' house at Camden Place look like a chilly museum of black-and-gold neoclassical furnishings. The film is full of beautiful shots, but they are never candy-box—if anything, Persuasion is suspicious of the standard forms of beauty. I had forgotten until he appeared on the harbor wall at Lyme that Samuel West had ever been as blond and leopardine as he is as a black-sheep Elliot cousin discovered diplomatically making up to Sir Walter in Bath, but his very prettiness serves as warning coloration for Anne, of a piece with his ardent but opaque flirtations. By contrast, none of the Navy men—as Sir Walter is so fond of noting—are pin-ups, but they have substance, however stubbly or contrary; they are themselves and not whatever their ambitions oblige them to appear at any moment. Anne's old school friend Mrs. Smith (Helen Schlesinger) is a widowed invalid of meager means, but she and her sharp-eared nurse (Jane Wood) are infinitely more fun to spend an afternoon with than the exalted waxwork of Lady Dalrymple (Darlene Johnson), the viscountess to whom the Elliots are presented with smothering formality. The script's allegiances are as unpretentious as its protagonists and just as clear. You can see the servants in this production; the work of living in this world. Happy endings are not bestowed by the gods of heritage pictures. Anne has to speak out to get hers, and Wentworth has to have learned how to hear.
I watched this movie with my mother who does not think she saw it when it came out and loved it as much as I did; she spoke to me afterward about the parallels and shadows with Austen's own life, about which I still know relatively little except her age when she died and the only good thing about that is Jo Walton's poem. I would like this story even if it were invented from whole cloth. Romance is not my native genre and I don't care, because I like watching people grow into themselves; I like that the film could close just fine with two people walking quietly down a street when the whirl of a passing circus has gone and instead it goes one better and gives its heroes—and us—the sea. I like what they see in each other, which we never have to take on faith. We see it for ourselves, shining between their smiles. This second chance brought to you by my constant backers at Patreon.
The premise is a classically Austenian intersection of hearts and economics; the title has a satirical, cautionary twist. Eight years ago, Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) was persuaded against her own judgment to reject a man she loved desperately because he "had nothing to recommend him but himself . . . no fortune, no connections," but now with Napoleon exiled to Elba and the wars seemingly at an end, that same Captain Frederick Wentworth (Ciarán Hinds) is returning to England an eminently eligible bachelor, a naval hero to the tune of £20,000 and so apparently ready to marry that his own sister jokes that "anybody between fifteen and thirty may have him for the asking—a little beauty, a few smiles, a few compliments of the Navy, and he's a lost man." In the meantime, the class-conscious and profligate Sir Walter Elliot (Corin Redgrave, a narcissistic vision in cornflower brocade) has run his family's own fortunes so badly into the ground that he is obliged to repair with his unmarried daughters to chic but less expansive lodgings in Bath and grudgingly let his estate to Admiral Croft (John Woodvine), the Trafalgar veteran whose personal and professional connections are the first step in the chain reaction of reuniting the once-lovers by inevitable social inconvenience, first in the Somerset countryside, then on the shingle of Lyme Regis, and finally in the shops and salons of Bath. We know from the start that Anne's feelings have not altered; she can barely articulate the beloved name without her throat going dry, her face pinched even paler than its usual anonymity. We know nothing about Wentworth except that he is tall, dark, not exactly handsome, and that he has an allergy to high society that would bode sympathetically for the equally private Anne if she could sense in the slightest that he does not despise her for breaking his heart—or worse, feel nothing about her one way or the other, having gotten over his disappointment and moved dashingly on. As she reminds a male friend, "You always have business to take you back into the world." And yet when Anne is footsore and stumbling from slogging all day on damp hillsides in the wake of her married younger sister and an excitable skein of in-laws, the taciturn captain is the first to notice; he hands her up to the Admiral's chaise to ride home instead of tiring herself further and suddenly all the screen is his gloved hand in the moss-colored folds of her cloak at the small of her back, all her awareness that one point of contact, so muffled, so fleeting, and so vital. The film will be intimately attentive to every such moment between them, all the more so because neither of them is given to grand gestures. The clues, if they exist, are minute and double-speaking, constrained by present diffidence as much as painful past. In this carefully monitored environment, even a look can be as galvanic as a shock. A kiss? If the film stock doesn't go up in flames, sure.
A romance that slow and subtly burning has to have actors who can carry every shade of their characters from wounded indifference and resignation to renewed hope and vulnerability and the measure by which Root and Hinds succeed may be my difficulty in thinking of anyone else in either part. The audience can yell "JUST KISS!" as loudly as they want, but the leap of confessing love takes courage, especially love that has been rebuffed or given up for lost. A man of panache and decision at sea who stands around stiffly at parties ashore, Wentworth is so much not his own idea of a romantic hero that he fails to appreciate how he's damn near everyone else's, which makes him a disaster at advancing his own heart's interests—even the false impression of competition can make him quit the field under the misapprehension that he's being tactful rather than an idiot. Anne's reasons for hesitation are thornier, rooted in those eight mute years of watching the sphere of her life shrink to the grounds of Kellynch Hall and the demands of her relations. By an unkind catch-22 of intelligence, she has become at once the family's redundant spinster and its only sensible member, which makes her invisible until needed and unappreciated even when useful. Her father is a red-frizzed dandy who unironically admires his reflection in the table silver while twitting about the disappointing frightfulness of the women one meets in Bath; her sisters are studies in passive aggression, Mary (Sophie Thompson) an expedient hypochondriac given to moaning about her health while motoring her way through breakfast, Elizabeth (Phoebe Nicholls) a fashion plate in everything but expression who appears to subsist, sylphlike, on a diet of sorbet and snubs. Altogether they leave the impression of people who can judge a stranger's social standing down to the micrometer but would fail to find their way out of a paper bag without a full complement of servants to hold lanterns and bear their condescension in silence, and the decisive assurance of their glamorous neighbor Lady Russell (Susan Fleetwood) offers Anne little respite when it steered her so wrong before. She has wasted in their company, so thin and vague that the Empire silhouette settles on her like sheets over the furniture of a shut-up house, her small, self-contained face washed out until its most distinguishing features are huge dark eyes under brows like broken commas. She looks like a lemur—the Roman kind, a starved and dispossessed ghost. It is both a reward and a relief to watch her blossom under the friendship of the Admiral and his wife Sophia (the wonderful Fiona Shaw), whose childless, unbreakable, vividly loving marriage models an ideal of shared life beyond social obligation, as well as the goodwill of her in-laws the Musgroves, who are collectively a little high-maintenance—one twingingly funny scene tracks the round-robin of every family member kvetching to Anne in turn—but sincere in their affection, which extends to mourning that their Charles (Simon Russell Beale) married Mary instead of Anne. Once out of the suffocating isolation of Kellynch Hall, we see that she makes friends warmly and readily, debating the constancy of women and men with the married Captain Harville (Robert Glenister) and matching the melancholic Captain Benwick (Richard McCabe)'s knowledge of Byron and Scott. She begins to dress to her own tastes, even her own advantage. When she studies her face in the mirror at night, she can see the gains of the day, not just pallor. And because Jane Austen in her last novel and Nick Dear in his first screenplay knew that only in Hollywood cliché does a woman take off her glasses and turn into Britain's next top model, Anne never looks a great beauty by the standards of her time or ours, but she becomes beautiful to us with her shy curl of a smile and her steady, deepening eyes, her face no longer so wan and drawn but sure and alive. It is Wentworth's good fortune to benefit from her newfound strength. He is not the reason she grows into it.
Persuasion was originally developed for the BBC as a co-production with WGBH Boston and Millesime and I don't believe it got even an Oscar nomination out of its U.S. theatrical release, but it did win a bunch of BAFTAs, including a well-deserved pair to John Daly for photography and lighting and Alexandra Byrne for costume design. When I say that this movie is my benchmark for historical costuming, I mean that the clothes look like clothes people live and work and travel in, not like showcases for actors in the modern eye, and they are true to the fashions of the time whether anyone looks good in them or not. (Spoiler: quite a lot of people look awful in Empire waists. I worry about the arsenic in some of those brilliantly flashy greens. Puce is less objectionable in person than I had been led to expect and the Musgrove girls are high-spirited in their poppy-bright cloaks, but Elizabeth can at one point be seen sporting a short jacket and tall hat in a color I believe to be evening primrose; it is vibratingly yellow and no friend to her complexion. I admire one of Sir Walter's coats and otherwise wish to hide when I see any of his waistcoats coming.) People's faces are wind-roughened, heat-flushed or cold-pinked; no one's hair is ever perfectly arranged. Even more incredibly, it's not '90's hair, which means that some characters are flattered by Psyche knots and some should hope their ringlets wilt as quickly as possible in the candle-heat of the salon. I am not as good at judging either makeup or lighting, but both certainly look minimal to natural to me. Days are luminous with rain; dinners are dramatically low-lit. Lyme is full of buffeting sea-breeze and haze and strong soaking sun. A rainy day in Bath makes the Elliots' house at Camden Place look like a chilly museum of black-and-gold neoclassical furnishings. The film is full of beautiful shots, but they are never candy-box—if anything, Persuasion is suspicious of the standard forms of beauty. I had forgotten until he appeared on the harbor wall at Lyme that Samuel West had ever been as blond and leopardine as he is as a black-sheep Elliot cousin discovered diplomatically making up to Sir Walter in Bath, but his very prettiness serves as warning coloration for Anne, of a piece with his ardent but opaque flirtations. By contrast, none of the Navy men—as Sir Walter is so fond of noting—are pin-ups, but they have substance, however stubbly or contrary; they are themselves and not whatever their ambitions oblige them to appear at any moment. Anne's old school friend Mrs. Smith (Helen Schlesinger) is a widowed invalid of meager means, but she and her sharp-eared nurse (Jane Wood) are infinitely more fun to spend an afternoon with than the exalted waxwork of Lady Dalrymple (Darlene Johnson), the viscountess to whom the Elliots are presented with smothering formality. The script's allegiances are as unpretentious as its protagonists and just as clear. You can see the servants in this production; the work of living in this world. Happy endings are not bestowed by the gods of heritage pictures. Anne has to speak out to get hers, and Wentworth has to have learned how to hear.
I watched this movie with my mother who does not think she saw it when it came out and loved it as much as I did; she spoke to me afterward about the parallels and shadows with Austen's own life, about which I still know relatively little except her age when she died and the only good thing about that is Jo Walton's poem. I would like this story even if it were invented from whole cloth. Romance is not my native genre and I don't care, because I like watching people grow into themselves; I like that the film could close just fine with two people walking quietly down a street when the whirl of a passing circus has gone and instead it goes one better and gives its heroes—and us—the sea. I like what they see in each other, which we never have to take on faith. We see it for ourselves, shining between their smiles. This second chance brought to you by my constant backers at Patreon.
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Nine
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Thank you!
I am not keen on romance myself, but I love lived-in worlds and lived-in faces, sailors' and servants'. This the least chocolate-boxy of all Austen films, muddy hems and all.
I was thinking about people's faces, watching the crowd scenes. Everyone in this movie has a face, even people you don't like, even people who don't get any lines. They look like they have lives whether you know about them or not.
I have still not seen much Austen on film. I want to rewatch the 1995 Sense and Sensibility; I last saw it in 2009 and I liked it then. The first time around it was my introduction to Alan Rickman.
Don't you love Lady Russell's homage-to-Marmion outfit?
I do, actually. Not everyone on this earth could carry off that much green-and-goldenrod tartan, but whatever Lady Russell's other failings, she absolutely could.
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And the shabbinesses and practicalities, yes, and the humidity-frizzed hair, and the glorious mud, and the toys... And the food's very good too. I can hardly refrain from smacking Lady Russell, the serpent.
My only objection in the casting is that Mary Musgrove looks much younger than she ought; she is the youngest of the Elliott sisters, but she has also had children, which would have worn her down a bit more than is shown.
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Including, I'm sure, a very brief appearance at the start? ;-) (I'm also amused on the same front, because the last time I watched this was before I started on my wider old telly odyssy and I hadn't registered that Corin Redgrave was also in this.)
It is lovely in so many ways, and I appreciate your detailing of them here. <3 It's quite weird to think it got released as a film elsewhere, although you can see why. (It was just on the BBC here; I had no idea until I was pointing out to someone online that technically this one was a TV adaptation that it had actually had a commercial release in some other countries.)
first in the Somerset countryside, then on the shingle of Lyme Regis
Genuine Somerset countryside, too. It has its own particular hazy light that I know very well from my childhood.
are studies in passive aggression, Mary (Sophia Thompson) an expedient hypochondriac
A fair typo, as the Admiral says everyone should be Sophia, I suppose! ;-p
his first screenplay knew that only in Hollywood cliché does a woman take off her glasses and turn into Britain's next top model, Anne never looks a great beauty by the standards of her time or ours,
No, indeed. What happens is that you walk past people you know in the street and then straight into a lamp-post, which you then apologise to.
Romance is not my native genre and I don't care, because I like watching people grow into themselves;
The latter of which is a very good description of Austen generally, really. *nods* (I confess I like a lot of different Austen adaptations in different ways, but the popular idea of Austen around as somehow romantic and pretty and all that is really very misleading.)
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I did in fact spot the David Collings! And I don't think anything tragic or bizarre even happened to him! His daughter won't marry Sir Walter, but I at least would consider that a bullet dodged. Being the man's lawyer has to be bad enough.
(I'm also amused on the same front, because the last time I watched this was before I started on my wider old telly odyssy and I hadn't registered that Corin Redgrave was also in this.)
He's perfect, in that he's insufferable.
It is lovely in so many ways, and I appreciate your detailing of them here.
Thank you. It was a pleasure to watch something I had remembered liking and like it even more this time around.
Genuine Somerset countryside, too. It has its own particular hazy light that I know very well from my childhood.
Nice. I am glad that can be seen. I have a soft spot for cities made of backlot, but I like the aspects of place that are just real or are just not.
A fair typo, as the Admiral says everyone should be Sophia, I suppose!
Fixed! Thank you for catching that.
(I confess I like a lot of different Austen adaptations in different ways, but the popular idea of Austen around as somehow romantic and pretty and all that is really very misleading.)
Agreed. Her romances have teeth.
(Do you like the famous 1995 Pride and Prejudice? I have still never seen it, despite knowing any number of people in high school who were legitimately obsessed with it.)
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I'm glad it succeeded! I saw the film first, so I was happy to discover that I liked the novel as well.
Hinds and Root are perfectly cast, indeed, and Fiona Shaw is radiant in her part.
I have no idea where I first saw Fiona Shaw to become fond of her, but it was definitely in place by the time of Persuasion and Sophia Croft sealed it. [edit] I saw her first as Irma Prunesquallor in the 2000 BBC Gormenghast, iliac crest and all. She was perfect. I should watch that again.
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I should have been so lucky! :o)
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You seem to have made a good harbor in the end.
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I first discovered Frock Flicks through their post about The Great Bobby Pin Shortage of the 1990s-2010s:
http://www.frockflicks.com/snark-week-bobby-pin-shortage/
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That's beautiful.
"A Knights Tale (2001) just plain panicked."
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All of these things.
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I would love to see it, if you do figure it out.
Lady Croft is probably my favorite character in all of Austen.
I have not yet read all of Austen, but she is pretty awesome.
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Thank you!
Which is understandable in that the era fits and they didn't have to spend money on building something that would be used so very briefly, but it does cast an ominous shadow on Captain Wentworth's future career....
I saw that in the credits! Ciarán Hinds may have bad luck with nautical futures. The last time I saw him before Persuasion, he was leading the Franklin expedition.
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Enjoy!
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And you have to be precisely the right coloring for evening-primrose, and nobody I know in real life ever actually is. It's, uh. It can't lie about its intentions.
Thank you for picking up all the period detail that makes this film Super to Die for If You Are A Selkie Who Watches No Films, too. It's got all the historical umph of Barry Lyndon and none of the auteurishness.
(This makes me want to set you loose on the Wasikowska Jane Eyre, simultaneously the best, best, best and the AUGH WHAT WORST of I think seven or eight Eyre adaptations.)
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Nine
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I think so.
(Did you like the other version(s) you've seen?)
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(YouTube worked sometimes for a while, and now it doesn't.)
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They shot it in sequence so we could watch Anne blooming in close to realtime, no artifice needed but Root's tremendous talent. I can't visualize either of them with any other face now.
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They're so beautifully matched.
I look forward to your fanfic.
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I loved loved loved this adaptation of my favorite Austen novel, and should rewatch it more.
I wish I had seen it in theaters. (In 1995, I barely saw any movies in theaters.) But it has held up now to two viewings on DVD, and I suspect it will hold up to many more.
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Is this the Austen adaptation in which one of the characters loses her shit and starts screaming, "She is a viscountess! A VISCOUNTESS!"? I think it is; it is the same actress who played Hugh Grant's wife in Maurice, I think. I only saw Persuasion once, but 23 years later, I still laugh remembering that line delivery.
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Thank you!
Is this the Austen adaptation in which one of the characters loses her shit and starts screaming, "She is a viscountess! A VISCOUNTESS!"?
It is! That is the incomparable Phoebe Nicholls, of Maurice and not that many other films but a fair amount of television. I am sure she plays modern roles, but I have never actually seen her in one. She has a good face for other times.
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Yes! It's still a comedy of manners, with Anne's horrifying family and characters all but assuming their way into marriage, but it never elbows you in the ribs about it, just as it doesn't overplay its bittersweetness. Everyone feels exactly the right size for the story.
Of course, I also liked it for shallow reasons, because Ciarán Hinds is so my kind of gorgeous and the happy ending is the sea.
I think both of these reasons are extremely valid.
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I am happy to have reminded you! I am pretty sure it can stand near-infinite rewatch.
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Have you seen HBO's show Rome? That was my own introduction to Ciarán Hinds, and he makes a wonderful Julius Caesar.
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Thank you!
Have you seen HBO's show Rome? That was my own introduction to Ciarán Hinds, and he makes a wonderful Julius Caesar.
I have not! The problem is that I don't watch a lot of TV, but at this point it's getting ridiculous. I recognize—and like—at least half of the main cast. I had not realized Hinds was among them.
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