Jess,
Re your comments
> Those are the 3 adaptations I've seen and I feel
> much the same way as you do about them Suzanne -
> the old BBC one is faithful but has no life to it . . .
That's true of a lot of those BBC serials from the '70's and '80's. They all get by on script and acting. There's no editing, no musical score to speak of, and switching back and forth from tape for indoor scenes to film for outdoor scenes is jarring. Even the Garvie/Rintoul version of P&P from 1980, a wonderful adaptation in many respects, has this problem.
The main problem I find with the '83 MP isn't the pacing, which I kinda expect from adaptations from that era, but the casting of the two main characters. Sylvestra Le Touzel just doesn't fit my image of Fanny, nor does Nicholas Farrel fit my image of Edmund. To be honest, the '99 film was an improvement in this regard. The grafting of latter-day politics onto a Regency story was annoying, but Frances O'Connor and Jonny Lee Miller (why doesn't he go by "Jonathan?" Billing himself like that makes him sound like a C&W star) look the parts for more closely in my opinion. JLM, coincidentally, also played one of Fanny's kid brothers in the '83 version.
> . . . the movie with the weird morphing of Fanny into a
> Jane Austen clone is a bad adaptation (the fact
> that Henry is handsome and has fair-ish colouring
> really bugs me - what bit of plain and dark did
> the writers not understand?!) . . .
We have to make some allowances for the fact that film is, after all, a visual medium. In a book we can imagine a guy who's plain still being attractive to woman, but, with rare exceptions like Humphrey Bogart, it's hard for audiences to accept a plain man being the chick-magnet that Henry's supposed to be. And who's to say "dark" didn't refer to his demeanor rather than his looks?
I frankly didn't mind so much that Fanny was played as being bookish and expressing herself through writing. Shy people do that, after all. She certainly wasn't as assertive as Lizzy, who, I suspect, is the most autobiographical of all of Miss Austen's heroines.
> . . . and the most recent
> one is claustrophic (can really tell the limited
> budget for sets), with Fanny somehow morphing into
> a hyperactive labrador puppy and Edmund turning
> into a whiney emo boy with Justin Bieber hair. It
> was so bad I actually laughed many times at how
> awful it was - the bit where the violin music
> swells as Edmund looks at Fanny and realises he
> loves her had me in stitches. There were two
> things I liked about it the first time I watched
> it - the fact that Fanny and William Price look
> like siblings, and the fact that Henry wasn't
> super handsome.
Didn't see that one. The stills, which had Julia Joyce looking pouty and sullen, with her hair in what seemed, to my uneducated eye, very non-Regency, put me off, and I'd been so disappointed in the version of Persuasion that was part of that Masterpiece Theatre series of presentations, that I decided to give it a pass.
> I really wonder what the difficulty is in adapting
> Fanny faithfully. Anne Elliot is a gentle, sweet
> soul like Fanny (with a lesser degree of neglect
> shown to her by her family) and adaptations of
> Persuasion have been able to capture that quality
> without changing her beyond recognition... why
> can't the same be done for Fanny?
Anne's sweet and gentle (and altogether my favorite Austen heroine), but she's no doormat. When push comes to shove, she stands up for herself, particularly if she's convinced she's in the right. Fanny just absorbs all the abuse like a punching bag, and returns nothing but love. Sweet and gentle, but firm and capable, people get and respect. Sweet and gentle, and taking undeserved punishment without complaint is a little harder for modern-day audiences to identify with.
Would Fanny, who has trouble just coping with the noisiness of a big, rambunctious family in Portsmouth, have the presence of mind to do what Anne did when Louisa got her head banged up at the Cobb? Maybe she'd rise to the occasion, but I'm not so sure. Her strength is the ability to endure, not to make quick decisions, and that quickness (while, I might add, all those decisive military types are standing around thinking "What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?") makes Anne much more acceptable to present-day audiences.
JIM D.
Re your comments
> Those are the 3 adaptations I've seen and I feel
> much the same way as you do about them Suzanne -
> the old BBC one is faithful but has no life to it . . .
That's true of a lot of those BBC serials from the '70's and '80's. They all get by on script and acting. There's no editing, no musical score to speak of, and switching back and forth from tape for indoor scenes to film for outdoor scenes is jarring. Even the Garvie/Rintoul version of P&P from 1980, a wonderful adaptation in many respects, has this problem.
The main problem I find with the '83 MP isn't the pacing, which I kinda expect from adaptations from that era, but the casting of the two main characters. Sylvestra Le Touzel just doesn't fit my image of Fanny, nor does Nicholas Farrel fit my image of Edmund. To be honest, the '99 film was an improvement in this regard. The grafting of latter-day politics onto a Regency story was annoying, but Frances O'Connor and Jonny Lee Miller (why doesn't he go by "Jonathan?" Billing himself like that makes him sound like a C&W star) look the parts for more closely in my opinion. JLM, coincidentally, also played one of Fanny's kid brothers in the '83 version.
> . . . the movie with the weird morphing of Fanny into a
> Jane Austen clone is a bad adaptation (the fact
> that Henry is handsome and has fair-ish colouring
> really bugs me - what bit of plain and dark did
> the writers not understand?!) . . .
We have to make some allowances for the fact that film is, after all, a visual medium. In a book we can imagine a guy who's plain still being attractive to woman, but, with rare exceptions like Humphrey Bogart, it's hard for audiences to accept a plain man being the chick-magnet that Henry's supposed to be. And who's to say "dark" didn't refer to his demeanor rather than his looks?
I frankly didn't mind so much that Fanny was played as being bookish and expressing herself through writing. Shy people do that, after all. She certainly wasn't as assertive as Lizzy, who, I suspect, is the most autobiographical of all of Miss Austen's heroines.
> . . . and the most recent
> one is claustrophic (can really tell the limited
> budget for sets), with Fanny somehow morphing into
> a hyperactive labrador puppy and Edmund turning
> into a whiney emo boy with Justin Bieber hair. It
> was so bad I actually laughed many times at how
> awful it was - the bit where the violin music
> swells as Edmund looks at Fanny and realises he
> loves her had me in stitches. There were two
> things I liked about it the first time I watched
> it - the fact that Fanny and William Price look
> like siblings, and the fact that Henry wasn't
> super handsome.
Didn't see that one. The stills, which had Julia Joyce looking pouty and sullen, with her hair in what seemed, to my uneducated eye, very non-Regency, put me off, and I'd been so disappointed in the version of Persuasion that was part of that Masterpiece Theatre series of presentations, that I decided to give it a pass.
> I really wonder what the difficulty is in adapting
> Fanny faithfully. Anne Elliot is a gentle, sweet
> soul like Fanny (with a lesser degree of neglect
> shown to her by her family) and adaptations of
> Persuasion have been able to capture that quality
> without changing her beyond recognition... why
> can't the same be done for Fanny?
Anne's sweet and gentle (and altogether my favorite Austen heroine), but she's no doormat. When push comes to shove, she stands up for herself, particularly if she's convinced she's in the right. Fanny just absorbs all the abuse like a punching bag, and returns nothing but love. Sweet and gentle, but firm and capable, people get and respect. Sweet and gentle, and taking undeserved punishment without complaint is a little harder for modern-day audiences to identify with.
Would Fanny, who has trouble just coping with the noisiness of a big, rambunctious family in Portsmouth, have the presence of mind to do what Anne did when Louisa got her head banged up at the Cobb? Maybe she'd rise to the occasion, but I'm not so sure. Her strength is the ability to endure, not to make quick decisions, and that quickness (while, I might add, all those decisive military types are standing around thinking "What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?") makes Anne much more acceptable to present-day audiences.
JIM D.