The Latest ‘Persuasion’

I watch every film interpretation of Austen that comes out. Therefore, I was not going to allow social media and very serious news outlets such as Vox and Yahoo to persuade me otherwise. They will try. They hated it, you see. Everyone hated it. But if it’s one message I learned from Austen’s book, allowing others to persuade me away from the right course of action leads to loneliness and anguish.

It was difficult not to enter this film with preconceived disdain for it. What I read about it was actually quite damning, that the producers had tacked modern vernacular and values onto the physical appearance of early nineteenth-century England. Jane Austen is popular for a myriad of reasons, and one of those is that romantic-era values are enticing to a population raised with little sense of value for traditions such as marriage. People also appreciate Jane Austen for her subtlety. Her characters have recognizable personalities that modern-day humans can relate to without having to hear those personalities speak in twenty-first century parlance.

On the other hand, Austen is subtle, and that leads modern humans to adapt her work in their heads any which way they want to. Nearly every Jane Austen fan I knew while studying her work in college lived unironic lives of fornication, while not valuing marriage and family the way Austen did. Rather, they drooled over the male characters and swooned over the dresses without the slightest hint of self-examination. As far as I know, most college students in this older millenial group have yet to do any real self-examination (I went back to school at age 28; hence, my fellow students were older millenials or very young Xers). I enjoyed my friends, but I left college with the sense that they had learned very little from their education, and certainly nothing from Jane Austen.

Bizarrely, I enjoyed this adaptation of Persuasion simply because it provides some self-examination for moderns. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that’s why it gets such a bad reaction from much of its contemporary audience. This film is anything but subtle, and for those playing at a fantasy game of bonnets while doing exactly what the main character does — drinking wine to ward away loneliness — this is going to be an uncomfortable film.

First of all, let it be known that this film adaptation deals in irony and comedy. So does Jane Austen, but as I already stated, Austen is subtle. For example, Austen paints the youngest Elliot daughter, Mary, as self-absorbed and prideful, but weak and sickly at the same time. She is not the kind of heroine a modern audience looks up to — she’s, in fact, not a heroine at all. She’s grossly reliant on others while maintaining a sense of pride in who she is as an Elliot daughter. That’s why it was amusing to me rather than jarring when she and Anne have a conversation in which she talks about needing “me time” to do “self care.” This is the epitome of stereotypical modern women. They are self-absorbed victims looking for attention. That is why media outlets such as Yahoo and Vox feature real-world Marys who self-identify with their “invisible” illnesses, which they proceed to parade visibly all over the internet.

Not only are they like Mary, but they eschew marriage like Anne — except they are persuaded by their surrounding culture to not be traditional, while Anne is persuaded by Lady Russell. It doesn’t matter, though. The result is the same. Moderns end up lonely, unable to have children before it’s too late, and they drown their sorrows in wine. The book version of Anne has an outward calm and inner torment, but in this film version we see the private torment through her downing a glass of brandy or weeping on the bed. Rejecting marriage, and in this case with a man the heroine desperately loves, leads to sorrow. This is apparently not a pleasant sight for young and not-so-young-any-longer women to witness. It’s not subtle at all. It’s painful.

Moving on to Lady Russell, this is a woman who is all about maintaining the Elliot pride. She is shallow and cares for money. She thus advises a young Anne to reject a perfectly good suitor, bloating her protege’s head with all manner of arrogance in herself and her value on the marriage market. This is true in both the book and the film adaptation, which is Austen’s particular irony, as Lady Russell is herself a spinster. In the film Lady Russell admits to Anne that she “goes to the continent” to avoid the inevitable loneliness of spinsterhood. What does this indicate? It indicates that women who end up as spinsters also end up as whores. In Austen’s work, this is shown through the manipulative Mrs. Clay, who is not a spinster but a widow. Again, the book is quite a bit more subtle in its message. Also, I believe it is an anachronism for a woman like Lady Russell to openly admit to Anne that she leads a scandalous life on the sly. I repeat: the film doesn’t even try to be subtle in its message.

Inevitably, I must discuss the least subtle message of the film: most of the cast is composed of black or Asian people. Obviously, this would never have happened in Austen’s time. Mary would not have married a black man. Their cousin, Mr. Elliot, would not have been Asian. Lady Russell would not have been black. Is the film merely attempting an eye-rolling level of diversity, or is there a larger message here? I’m going to guess there is a larger message.

Yeah, about that larger message — the man Anne rejected so many years before the story starts is a navy captain. Navy captains in those days had the ability to become rich, thereby making themselves eligible bachelors to respectable landed gentry daughters. How did they become wealthy? They were mercenaries for the crown. In other words, they helped England colonize the globe. Persuasion was published in 1818, at the start of a colonizing century that would peak at one-quarter of the globe being subject to the crown of England. Therefore, men such as Anne’s Captain Wentworth brought Africans and Asians into the “family” of England, even if they were unwilling subjects. In the concert scene, when the camera slowly sweeps the audience, the diversity sticks out like a sore thumb. Obviously, I can’t get in the mind of the people who made this film, but my interpretation is this: shallow women like Russell (herself an ironically black character) pushed men such as Wentworth into whoring themselves for the crown so that they could find decent wives. This disrupted the social world of the day by raising these men’s statuses, but it also had the result of eventually creating a very diverse society. In a sense, what we are seeing in this film is ghosts of the future. The film barely pulls away from being critical of this now-diverse England through levity and humor and not resting too long in any one scene. The criticism is still evident, however, and this, again, is going to rankle a modern audience. Modern audiences such as readers of Vox do not like diversity being viewed through a critical lens.

Was it a good film, though? Clearly, I found its messaging ironic and amusing, but does that put it on my list of favorite Jane Austen adaptations? Earlier, I said that much of the audience will hate this film because it forces too much self-examination onto a modern audience. There is another subset of people who are going to be critical of this film for the unfortunate reason that nobody has ever made a decent Persuasion film that represents the book. I am one of those people. This film does not satisfy me on that level. I’m still waiting for a stellar version that follows the essence and feel of the book. For a start, this version has a brooding Darcy-esque Captain Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis). While attractive enough to be the captain, he leaves a lot to be desired performance-wise. Anne (Dakota Johnson), Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce), and Mr. Elliot (Henry Golding) are well acted, but only Anne is given decent screentime. The other characters left zero impression on me. Louisa Musgrove is almost a nonentity. On the plus side, the sets, costumes, and filmography are lovely.

Given the above, I don’t know how to rate this film. I’m pretty sure that after the furor dies down, clips of it will be used in college literature classes to invoke critical readings of the novel. I’m not sure that’s what any filmmaker really desires, though.