First off, I do not object to adaptations making even significant changes - or modernizing, per se. The question is how well are these done, and whether they illuminate the story.
For example, the 1995 Sense and Sensibility took great liberties with the text but illustrated the heart of the story so well that I believe it does Miss Austen better than she herself did.
Persuasion, a very fine little jewel of a novel, has been adapted to feature films twice before; the best was the first, 1995's entry starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. The 2007, Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones, wasn't bad, though I cannot believe in Penry-Jones as a necessarily weatherbeaten sailor. Not with his milky skin.
This new one, however, suffers from a miscast heroine (Dakota Johnson would be a better for for Elizabeth Bennett than for Anne Elliot), a stage director's maiden film effort (she may improve, but she cannot pace a film to save her life), a truly epically bad script (telling over and over, rather than showing), and modernizations and film fads which simply do not work.
Anne Elliott, whom the novel tells us is given no consequence in her home, who has every task and responsibility dumped on her and who meekly shoulders them, is here an idle alcoholic, it appears, guzzling from wine bottles as she lolls self-indulgently in her bath or on her bed. She has no occupation of any kind about her home, she is sarcastic, without propriety, even rude.
This woman bears not the slightest resemblence to anything Austen ever wrote.
The script makes it so clear so early that not only does Anne still love her once-rejected (unpon persuasion) sailor, Captain Wentworth, he's still besotted too, though his pride has been wounded, so many invented tetes-a-tete are manufactured, that the outcome has no suspense, any dramatic tension so long deflated as to leave the climax a limp balloon.
I could go on and on about this film's shortcomings. It provides so much material.
However, if you like romantic fluff, are not particular as to the actual artistic merit of a film, have no knowledge or understanding of Jane Austen's work, English society in the early 1800s, no ability to discern good dialogue or direction from awful, maybe this is yoru cup of tea.
For example, the 1995 Sense and Sensibility took great liberties with the text but illustrated the heart of the story so well that I believe it does Miss Austen better than she herself did.
Persuasion, a very fine little jewel of a novel, has been adapted to feature films twice before; the best was the first, 1995's entry starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. The 2007, Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones, wasn't bad, though I cannot believe in Penry-Jones as a necessarily weatherbeaten sailor. Not with his milky skin.
This new one, however, suffers from a miscast heroine (Dakota Johnson would be a better for for Elizabeth Bennett than for Anne Elliot), a stage director's maiden film effort (she may improve, but she cannot pace a film to save her life), a truly epically bad script (telling over and over, rather than showing), and modernizations and film fads which simply do not work.
Anne Elliott, whom the novel tells us is given no consequence in her home, who has every task and responsibility dumped on her and who meekly shoulders them, is here an idle alcoholic, it appears, guzzling from wine bottles as she lolls self-indulgently in her bath or on her bed. She has no occupation of any kind about her home, she is sarcastic, without propriety, even rude.
This woman bears not the slightest resemblence to anything Austen ever wrote.
The script makes it so clear so early that not only does Anne still love her once-rejected (unpon persuasion) sailor, Captain Wentworth, he's still besotted too, though his pride has been wounded, so many invented tetes-a-tete are manufactured, that the outcome has no suspense, any dramatic tension so long deflated as to leave the climax a limp balloon.
I could go on and on about this film's shortcomings. It provides so much material.
However, if you like romantic fluff, are not particular as to the actual artistic merit of a film, have no knowledge or understanding of Jane Austen's work, English society in the early 1800s, no ability to discern good dialogue or direction from awful, maybe this is yoru cup of tea.
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