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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