If there is a problem with the film it’s not lack of deference to Austen, austere face of the £10 note, but rather that Cracknell is uninterested in Persuasion’s darkness. In addition, the set design and costumes are exquisite, and the film’s colour palette is bright and vibrantly arresting. Richard E Grant is also wonderful as the dandyish, indebted baronet Sir Walter Elliot, Anne’s father, on his way down in the world just as self-made men like Captain Wentworth are on the way up. Especially winning is the slow-eyed, Sylvester Stallone-like vulnerability with which Jarvis plays Wentworth.
Como Jarvis’s Captain Wentworth – all bluff physicality and bruising side-to-side gait – is perfect for the naval captain returned to shore, not so much taciturn as tongue-tied around his lost love, Anne Elliot. It’s not that big of a deal.Īside from the dialogue, the performances in Cracknell’s film are terrific. Women saying such things would have been almost unthinkably shocking.Ĭracknell has updated Persuasion’s idiom. Take Mansfield Park, for instance, where, frowning at four dubiously acquired pheasant eggs, the young lady of the house Maria Bertram, asks her aunt Mrs Norris: “What else have you been spunging?” In the same novel, a female character – punning on different ranks of admirals – makes an unspeakably rude joke about “rears and vices” in the navy. Austen’s novels are stuffed with fashionable expressions. The fact that all this happens in the film doesn’t amount to an “ almost total disregard” for the film’s source material. Anne Elliot might refer to her handsome cousin, the nefarious Mr Elliot, as a “10”.
Captain Wentworth might tell Louisa Musgrove that being seated next to her at dinner is “quite the upgrade”. Mary Musgrove, Anne’s youngest sister, might, like the film’s iteration of the character, anachronistically declare she’s an “empath”. Just as she drew on the popularity of Georgian-period tropes like sending letters between characters, writing today she would be making full use of contemporary stylistic tics – including knowing asides wryly delivered straight to camera.
If Jane Austen were writing today, she wouldn’t be producing “classic” Austen novels.
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