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Jan. 14th, 2008 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newmoonstarSo last night The Complete Jane Austen finally kicked off on Masterpiece Theatre. And I'm... underwhelmed. It was Persuasion, which is my favorite of the books, so I was really hopeful that it would work, but it didn't. It was just so... blah. And it looks even worse when you compare it to the 95 version, which was well acted, beautifully made, and darn well near perfect.
To start off with, the overall look of the film was so gray and muted, it looked more like a Dickens adaptation than Austen. And the actors were all wrong; either they were too over the top or too understated. And what on earth was with Anne Elliot crying all the time? She never cried in the book! She's crying in every other scene and it got so annoying. I think they were trying to show how heartbroken she was or something, but that's a rather amateurish way to do it. In the 95 version Amanda Root conveyed a greater depth of emotion without shedding a tear. That was really the biggest dissappointment for me; Persuasion is, I feel, the most passionately romantic of all Austen's novels, and you just didn't feel that at all here, there was absolutely no emotion anywhere. Granted, it is hard to show Anne and Wentworth's relationship re-ignite when so much of it is unspoken, or masked by the formality of the time, but it can be done, the 95 version did it beautifully. One of the things I hoped the new version would do was make it possible to follow the plot without having read the book, which it does, but I think they sacrificed a lot of character developement in it's place. Both the leads and the supporting characters get short shrift here, whereas you got to know and love them all in the 95 version. You'll be clueless about how they got from a to b in the 95 version if you haven't read the the book, but if you have, you can at least forget about that and simply concentrate on the characters and how they develop, whereas here you might be able to follow it, but what does that matter if you don't care about these flat, un-interesting characters? To someone who had never read or seen any version of Persuasion, I would tell them to see the 95 version instead of this one. In that one, at least, you can tell there's a beautiful love story in there, and it will intrigue you enough to make you seek out the book, as was the case for me. But I think if I'd have seen this version first, I would have written off the book as probably being no better than the film and passed it by, and would thereby have missed out on one of the best books I ever read. And that, really, says it all in my opinion.
Despite all the disappointment of Persuasion though, I still have high hopes for Northanger Abbey. It's my second favorite, and it's never been made into a film before (the 80's version doesn't count!) so that's exciting in and of itself, and anyways there's no really good version already out there to compare it to!
To start off with, the overall look of the film was so gray and muted, it looked more like a Dickens adaptation than Austen. And the actors were all wrong; either they were too over the top or too understated. And what on earth was with Anne Elliot crying all the time? She never cried in the book! She's crying in every other scene and it got so annoying. I think they were trying to show how heartbroken she was or something, but that's a rather amateurish way to do it. In the 95 version Amanda Root conveyed a greater depth of emotion without shedding a tear. That was really the biggest dissappointment for me; Persuasion is, I feel, the most passionately romantic of all Austen's novels, and you just didn't feel that at all here, there was absolutely no emotion anywhere. Granted, it is hard to show Anne and Wentworth's relationship re-ignite when so much of it is unspoken, or masked by the formality of the time, but it can be done, the 95 version did it beautifully. One of the things I hoped the new version would do was make it possible to follow the plot without having read the book, which it does, but I think they sacrificed a lot of character developement in it's place. Both the leads and the supporting characters get short shrift here, whereas you got to know and love them all in the 95 version. You'll be clueless about how they got from a to b in the 95 version if you haven't read the the book, but if you have, you can at least forget about that and simply concentrate on the characters and how they develop, whereas here you might be able to follow it, but what does that matter if you don't care about these flat, un-interesting characters? To someone who had never read or seen any version of Persuasion, I would tell them to see the 95 version instead of this one. In that one, at least, you can tell there's a beautiful love story in there, and it will intrigue you enough to make you seek out the book, as was the case for me. But I think if I'd have seen this version first, I would have written off the book as probably being no better than the film and passed it by, and would thereby have missed out on one of the best books I ever read. And that, really, says it all in my opinion.
Despite all the disappointment of Persuasion though, I still have high hopes for Northanger Abbey. It's my second favorite, and it's never been made into a film before (the 80's version doesn't count!) so that's exciting in and of itself, and anyways there's no really good version already out there to compare it to!
