I suppose that the BBC commissioned the director Adrian Shergold and the writer Simon Burke to come up with the most recent (2007) adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, but perhaps they didn't realize what a thankless task that was -- thankless, because the novel had been adapted for a 1995 movie (writer, Nick Dear and director, Roger Michell) that was in almost every way outstanding, capturing the spirit of the novel as well as a good deal of the letter. It was also unusually strongly cast from top to bottom, with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds (pictured above) in the leading roles, and Fiona Shaw and Simon Russell Beale in quite minor roles; it is well-paced and designed, and effectively shot. The 2007 version is a sad disappointment, though the degree to which the viewer is disappointed or satisfied will probably depend on his or her familiarity with the novel. It needs to be said right away, then, that Anne Elliott, as represented in the 2007 film bears no resemblance to the heroine of Jane Austen's novel.
This needs to be said to absolve the actress playing Anne -- Sally Hawkins -- of responsibility for the film's shortcomings. The writing and the direction in the 2007 film make Anne weepy, limp, impulsive, and undignified. In the novel, it is Anne's younger sister, Mary, to whom Austen gives these qualities. By contrast, Anne in the novel is perceptive about all around her, capable of both deep feeling and restraint, and especially aware of the degree to which her father and sisters are lacking in dignity and sense, even if her own sense of loyalty to her family and her dead mother's memory is too strong to make her openly critical of them or do anything undignified herself. All these qualities of Anne are caught by Nick Dear in his 1995 script and are beautifully realized in Amanda Root's performance as Anne -- one of the finest performances I have ever seen in a film, adaptation or not. Sally Hawkins, unfortunately, is given no chance to represent a character of such depth and interest. Readers of the novel will remember how Anne, forced by circumstance to be relatively passive in the early action of the novel, comes to learn that Captain Wentworth, whom she loved and with whom she broke an engagement seven years prior to the novel's opening, will NOT in fact marry Louisa Musgrove and is therefore "free" to form other attachments. From that point on in the novel, Anne becomes actively interested in bringing herself to Captain Wentworth's attention without coming close to "throwing herself at him," so to speak. It's a subtle move from passivity to purpose in the novel, and it is understood perfectly in the 1995 film and beautifully rendered in Amanda Root's performance. What I called "the spirit of the novel" is very much tied into Anne's character. With "her knowledge, which she often wished less, of her father's character" -- and her family's in general, it should be said -- she is the reader's surrogate in the novel, the dependable center of consciousness that keeps us interested in her fate by having us constantly endorse her judgment. All this Amanda Root obviously understands and brings to life.
The conception of Anne's character is not the 2007 film's only problem. The sequence of events at the end of the novel in which Anne and Wentworth come to an understanding that their feelings for one another have not changed is followed quite closely in the 1995 film -- it would take too long to give all the details here -- but that final action is completely changed in the 2007 version, which has Anne madly sprinting through the streets of Bath to catch Captain Wentworth, who is presented as always having just left the house to which she has run to find him. When she finally does find him, she's a sweaty and breathless mess. There is nothing -- nothing at all -- like this in the novel. Some critics of both films have complained of the public kiss that seals the lovers' reunion in both versions, and one takes the point that in Bath, c. 1814, such a public display of affection would be unlikely, but these critics' discomfort with the kiss must pale before the sight of a well-bred young woman in a long dress sprinting like a mad thing through Bath's cobbled streets in pursuit of a man. Dustin Hoffman's sprint to the church in 1967, at the end of The Graduate, is one thing. A young woman running to catch a man in 1814 is quite another.
All the other characters in the novel are more one-dimensional than Anne, but in the films, Ciaran Hinds, as Wentworth in 1995, suggests a person of substance, experience, and feeling much more effectively than Rupert Penry-Jones in 2007, who looks merely peevish for most of his film. Also in 1995, John Woodvine and Fiona Shaw (as the Crofts) and Simon Russell Beale (as Anne's brother-in-law Charles Musgrove), and Samuel West (as the younger Mr Elliott) have indelible cameos. Also, the young Musgrove sisters are more sharply distinguished in the 1995 version, and Sophie Thompson (as Anne's sister Mary) makes her character less of a caricature than is the case in 2007. The late Susan Fleetwood is a fine Lady Russell in 1995, and the excellent Alice Krige, in 2007, is just as effective.
I have some reservations about the 1995 version, especially where Anne's elder sister and her school friend Mrs Smith are concerned, but these are small matters. The 1995 film is one of the great adaptations, and (again) Amanda Root's is a performance to cherish.
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