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Author:
Sheila Benson
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Sheila Benson was the principal Los Angeles Times film critic from 1981-91, following which she was their Critic At Large, writing on all aspects of the cultural life of that city. She also has written for Cinemania/msn.com for which she was chief film critic and many other papers.
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If critics can be said to have favorites -- and they have -- early on Sheila was a particular champion of independent films, as they were finding their voice and their power. As a result, her reports from the earliest days of Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley and the Sundance festivals found their way into what was then the "Industry"-centric Times.
Moving online, she was chief film critic for Microsoft's invaluable Cinemania from its birth to its death, 4 ½ years later. She has also contributed coverage, essays and interviews to Interview, Elle, Premiere, Film Comment, Variety, the San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Weekly, London Telegraph's Weekend magazine, Canada's Globe and Mail American Film Magazine and the New York Times.
Affiliated with the National Society of Film Critics, FIPRESCI (the International Film Critics Association) and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1981-95), she has taught Critical Writing at UCLA and has been a jury member at the film festivals of Berlin, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Hawaii, Manila, Seattle, Aspen, Sundance/Park City, Taos, Banff and Palm Springs. In 1987, she was given the Vesta Award for Journalism for her contribution to the arts in Southern California. She wrote the narration for Chuck Workman's "The First 100 Years: A Celebration of American Film" for Bravo, and in 2004 wrote the critical essay for the DVD of Horton Foote's Tomorrow for Home Vision Entertainment.
Having moved to Washington in 1996, she now reviews for the Seattle Weekly.
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"Persuasion"
We're beginning to get it: This fall it's a Jane thing. Jane Austen's on our screens, all's right with the world, at least at the movies. Austen's "Emma" provided the steely backbone of Clueless; now we have the all-encompassing delight of Persuasion; in December, we can look forward to Sense and Sensibility adapted by and starring Emma Thompson.
In the hands of director Roger Michell and his supple and intelligent cast, Persuasion is not simply a must-see, it's a see, and see-again and then again. I'm on my third trip and I haven't exhausted its layers.
A sliver of background helps at first. Eight years before the film opens, 19-year old Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) had been advised not to marry a young Naval officer, Frederick Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds), "a man with nothing but himself to recommend him." Since Anne's mother is dead and the advice came from a well-born, trusted friend of her family's, Lady Russell (Susan Fleetwood), she took it.
Wentworth jumped into the Navy as a midshipman; now, eight years later he has returned, a rich and successful captain. The custom in the early 1800s allowed naval officers to keep the riches of the ships they captured; it was the beginning of enduring fortunes and a foothold on social position.
So, as the film begins, prophetically aboard an English sailing ship, the scales are reversed. Anne's foppish, widowed father, Sir Walter Elliot (Corin Redgrave) has run through most of the family's fortune. With creditors literally crowding the doors of his estate, Kellynch, he retreats with Anne's older, unmarried sister, the pinched-faced, snobbish Elizabeth (Phoebe Nicholls), to less expensive surroundings in Bath.
It's all domestic arrangements in these first few scenes, as that great fool Sir Walter reluctantly leases his estate, and "the use of the second-best silver," to a Naval man. (His contempt drips.) It's Admiral Croft, actually (John Woodvine), and with his wife (Fiona Shaw), two of the film's most moving lovers.
Watch Mrs. Croft's beautifully not-young face as she tells of crossing the Atlantic four times with her adored husband, "We none of us want to be in calm waters all our life," she says, simply. That light doesn't come from cinematography.
"Persuasion" was written when Austen was 40; she died at 41. To director Michell, "The idea of the author, shortly before her death, writing about lost opportunities was moving. It's not the brightest or most glittering [novel], like 'Pride and Prejudice,' but the most poignant."
Not to mention the most erotic. Michell misses none of this. As Anne and Capt. Wentworth are thrown together again, she aches at the very sight of him, while he smolders with resentment. (Ciaran Hinds in no way resembles Sean Connery; for one thing, he is Irish and easily elegant, but the heat is the same.) If ever a film made its audience ache too, to have two halves of a whole united, it's this one.
Still, it's no wonder Persuasion has never made it to the screen before. In Anne Elliot, screenwriter Nick Dear has a grand central character: strong, courageous, selfless, witty and knowledgeable. Speaks Italian too, but for fully half the film she hardly speaks at all.
You may not even notice it. Amanda Root's huge, expressive brown eyes miss nothing; we can't be blamed for thinking she's spoken everything she feels. Then too, Anne's family is busy explaining her to herself, when they're not outright dismissing her. It's raining, only room for two in the carriage? "Anne can walk," her haughty sister offers.
At one point there's a medical emergency with a child, and the mother doesn't really feel like missing a good party to sit up with her son's broken collarbone and possible spinal injuries. She says airily to Anne, "You're the properest person [to stay]; you haven't a mother's feelings."
From having too few beaux, Anne begins to accumulate a few too many, in Wentworth's eyes. They include the young heir-presumptive to Kellynch, Sir William Walter Elliot (Samuel West), who delights in Anne's forthright view of society.
Then there is Wentworth's friend, Captain Benwick, whose fiancee has died when he was at sea. The bond between Benwick and Anne is the thrilling romantic poetry just on the scene, verses like Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion." But Anne does caution him to add a bit of prose to his diet of melancholy poems, "Too much poetry may be . . . unsafe."
What these various encounters finally bring out, in the film's second half, is Anne's ability to speak for herself, with words stirring enough to bring tears to the eyes. "All the privilege I claim for my own sex," she says near the end, "is that of loving longest, when... hope is gone."
A leading member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Amanda Root has that great capacity of all really fascinating actresses of seeming plain one minute and incandescent the next. The young woman who regards herself in the mirror at the opening, clearly sure that, at 27, her marriageable days are past, looks nothing like the Anne of the last, deliciously satisfying scene with her family.
The rest of the large cast of characters are brilliantly drawn, by actors who seem brand new. Not true.
The Admiral's wife, Fiona Shaw, was Daniel Day Lewis' doctor in My Left Foot. If Anne's blond, titled suitor looks familiar, it's because Samuel West played the ill-fated Leonard Bast in Howard's End. And Anne Elliot's younger sister Mary, a hilariously hard-working hypochondriac, is Sophie Thompson; not only Emma Thompson's sister but one-half of the most insatiable newly-weds in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Mary Elliot has married into a family so big and so boisterous they might have leapt out of Dickens. They are the Musgroves: an expansive father and mother, two daughters and Mary's husband Charles, a tubby King Charles Spaniel of a man. They are a family that truly does everything together, whether it was the style of the day or not.
They are exactly what Eudora Welty meant when she asked, "How could these novels ever seem remote? For one thing, the noise!"
There is noise, bustle, thrust, parry, lunge and cut to the heart in Persuasion. It's the most invigorating movie imaginable.
© 1995 by Sheila Benson. All Rights Reserved.
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