"I have loved none but you."
Hello everyone!
BUT.
I'm making up for that this week with a rather lovely choice, if I do say so myself, because I'm starting to realize I have different preferences regarding Jane Austen than I did while still in the throes of growing up, so to speak.
Don't get me wrong, Pride and Prejudice will ALWAYS be her best work, but her other novels deserve the same sort of respect, too.
Especially and most particularly the one I chose for tonight's blog, or its adaptation at least.
Bonnets out, everyone. Enter Persuasion, the 2007 version, stage right.
Any posts connected to this one in some way, shape or form can be found at the bottom of the page, as per usual!
Now, Persuasion is Austen's last finished novel before she passed, not a posthumous work, and as such I feel like it deserves special recognition. Then again, I'm also severely biased so, I'm not sure how much more impassive I can get LOL!
To be clear: I'm reviewing the 2007 version, with Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones in the titular roles of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. There's a bunch of other adaptations, a nineties one that everyone seems to think is the best, and a recent one from Netflix that's not as faithful to the source material but made more fun, somehow?
I may review those too, while I'm at it. I'll see.
For now, allons-y!
Persuasion tells the story of Anne Elliot, middle daughter to a baronet who has less sense in his head than a regular blonde does nowadays, because he cares only about appearances and is EXTREMELY silly. Because his wife is no longer alive to moderate spending, the family's fallen on hard times and have to leave their ancestral home, accepting renters so that they can eventually become solvent again.
Anne seems to be the only one affected by this, but we soon realize not many people care about HER, either, because she's an after-thought to her father and older sister, who send her over to her younger sister to care for her, while they move on along to Bath.
This is complicated for many reasons: one being that Mary, the youngest Elliot, is a hypochondriac, and sees illness in everything. And I mean EVERYTHING.
Two, and more important, however, is that the Crofts who're renting the Elliott home are related to a certain Frederick Wentworth, a man previously engaged to Anne, but whom she was persuaded to break off with on advice from her godmother, Lady Russell.
Now Wentworth's in the country again, so OF COURSE they're eventually going to meet, but he's still mad as hell about what happened eight years ago, so he gives Anne the cold shoulder and makes it clear he's going to be settling down with a wife - just not HER, obviously.
Instead, his attentions are given to Mary's sisters-in-law, Henrietta and Louisa, though Henrietta is basically engaged to a curate, so Louisa seems to be the obvious choice, which even Anne acknowledges: she's spirited, determined, but also very steadfast and occasionally even stubborn.
What follows is a montage of how Anne is just shunted to the side and basically forgotten by everyone unless they need her or need something from her which only she can provide, with her sensible nature, and I'm telling you this is PAINFUL to watch, especially if you've ever been in a situation like Anne or recognize yourself in her.
The party heads on down to Lyme where Wentworth is visiting a friend, or two friends really, Captains Harville and Benwick, the latter of whom is mourning the loss of his fiancée, which is an important point because Anne can sympathise with the man and slowly draws him out of his shell.
Things may have even been gay if not for the fact Louisa's made it a point to always jump into Wentworth's arms from high places, and now at one point he fails to catch her, so she falls and bonks her head. Anne jumps into action, ordering everyone about, and then returns with Henrietta and Wentworth to deliver the news of the fall to the girl's parents.
Because this is a movie and not a book told from one person's perspective, we also get a lot more from Wentworth than we do in the book itself, as he later confesses to Harville that he's been an idiot. More so, because Harville tells him that everyone basically sees an agreement between him and Louisa, so Frederick is essentially trapped, by his own honour.
And the man has JUST realized that he doesn't want the chit!
Luckily, after an absence during which he visits his brother, Louisa accepts a proposal from Captain Benwick, and Frederick is finally free to pursue the woman he actually wants.
Said woman has, by now, joined her family in Bath, where she's made acquainted with their estranged cousin, Mr. Elliott, who'll inherit the family seat unless daddy-o doesn't produce a male heir somehow.
The cousin starts courting Anne, of all people, but she's unsure about this - then again, she'd been counseled against accepting the suit of the man who eventually married Mary instead, as well as pushing Frederick away, so she's got some experience with all this. But something's rotten in the state of Denmark, as they say, and her heart is more set on Wentworth than ever, particularly as he pops up in Bath.
Of course he's then made to believe Anne's engaged, and comes to tell her that the Crofts will vacate the premises of her childhood home if that's her wish, so she can take up residence there, but LUCKILY she sets the guy straight and tells him she's not engaged in any way.
This gives him hope, and while she narrowly misses him after chasing after him, she does receive his note afterwards in which he confesses his love and devotion, and asks for her hand again.
This time, Anne accepts (once she finds the dude again, of course), and the two of them marry (no word on how everyone feels about THAT, but we can imagine!). To tie things off neatly with a bow, Frederick buys her family's home for her as a wedding present, which fills her with great joy, and the movie ends with a shot of the two of them dancing on the lawn before the entrance.
Because, NATURALLY.
As always with Austen's work, this one's filled with messages and lessons; Wentworth is deemed unacceptable at the start of the Napoleonic wars because he has no name to speak of, and no money, when Anne's told to break it off with him. By the time he makes his reappearance, he's a war hero AND rich to boot from war prizes, so he's eminently more suitable this second time around.
The narration makes things difficult, however, because our main couple doesn't really speak until the second act, which means the focus has to be elsewhere, and we explore the themes of constancy, the love of men and women and their nature, and family relations, both good and bad.
As far as the movie goes, I think it's really great in portraying just how Wentworth feels about all of this, and Jones captures that perfectly. Hawkins is really good as the timid Anne to start with, but I'll admit there's something about her performance that's slightly irritating in the second half, not that I can put a finger on it.
But overall the casting was perfect, and Tobias Menzies is again put in a role that's not a positive one in this, which amuses me to no end. He seems to have the face for it!
The movie's only an hour and a half long, which is MUCH less than any other adaptation I'm sure, and thoroughly enjoyable, as well as painful on occasion as we watch Anne struggle (there's lots of shots of her writing and crying over her diary). But it's a lovely second chance story with the kind of drama Jane Austen wrote perfectly, and this movie captures the heart of it well.
10/10 recommend!
xx
*images and video not mine
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