The Talkies/Friendly Persuasion

...So all praise to Persuasion for doing as much...

...It was just what she needed—to be able to toss her pretty head at the Puritan magistrates and defiantly tell them: "I believe I have sinned in your eyes, but who's to know if God shares your view...

...The question is how to represent that strangeness on screen in an instantly recognizable, visual way...

...And so it is with Strange Days, whose title is just another way of saying 1999...

...Then he tops it all off with the best magical-realist trick of all...

...Another paradox—actually the same paradox—is that the more "real" it is supposed to look the more transparently fake it really is...

...The trouble is that you come away from both films wondering what the point of them is...

...So Messrs...

...Nor is this Cinderella story at all unJane-like...

...The high-tech is virtual reality or SQUID, a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device that actually resembles a squid...

...if martial law then no riots...

...Yes, we are to understand that, at the time of the action of the novel, eight years later, Lady Russell's advice was mistaken...

...It is also cute that the film's four stars (Miss Moore again, Melanie Griffith, Rosie O'Donnell, and Rita Wilson) are matched up with versions of their 12year-old selves (Gaby Hoffman, Thora Birch, Christina Ricci, and Ashleigh Aston Moore, respectively) in order to solve a Nancy Drew type mystery and learn valuable lessons such as that they shouldn't shut themselves off from the world and should make new friends and keep the old...

...Arthur Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman) and Hester Prynne (Demi Moore) are software...

...Lenny, though an ex-cop himself, is a bit of a wimp and frequently has to be rescued by his friend, the buff chauffeuse cum bodyguard, Mace (Angela Bassett...

...And just as you have tough gals beating up guys in the past, so you have tough gals beating up guys in the future...

...But who thinks about that...

...The question of how far those to whom we are bound by kinship or friendship may be permitted to tell us what to do—to guide us in the courses of prudence and good sense—has long been settled...

...Three Wishes, having been set in 1955, had to undertake a major logistical exercise to get all the period details right...

...We are free, andsomeone like Lady Russell (Susan Fleetwood), who has persuaded Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) not to marry Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds), is simply an interfering old cow who ought to be sent packing...

...But the movies 68 The American Spectator December 1995 don't work like this...

...Strange Days, for instance, is a demonstration of the paradox that the more strange and weird and "futuristic" one wishes to make a picture, the more tired and hackneyed the devices one has to use...

...Anything with a date attached to it automatically is committed to that date before plot, characterization, and, of course, plausibility...

...Three Wishes by Martha Coolidge is a kind of Time Machine movie which is set in 1955 but transports into that time a very New Age kind of guy, played by Patrick Swayze, in order to present an unobtrusive indictment of all that, from the vantage point of the 1990s, we now think was particularly awful about the 1950s—or everything except its racism, which does not appear...

...But we never see Anne in the slightest disposed to be persuaded even by Lady Russell, let alone the others, so the whole issue is moot...

...Jane Austen would not have agreed...

...On the contrary, the past must learn from thepresent...

...Never mind the absurdity of combining the lawless streets with tanks and heavily armed soldiers...

...Dear and Michell very deftly and cleverly sever all connection with the business of persuasion and instead make their film version into every woman's romance: the need to be loved for herself alone and the fulfillment, after many false steps and near-misses, of that need...

...Cruel and Oppressive Men, Sexual Freedom vs...

...The world portrayed in Strange Days, set on New Year's Eve 1999, could obviously have been as little distinguishable from the present as the present is from 1991...

...Of course it is nothing of the kind...

...Both riots and martial law are recognizably futuristic, so both get thrown in...

...My Movie of the Month is the adaptation of her Persuasion by Roger Michell (director) and Nick Dear (writer) that is (1) just about the best possible adaptation of a classic novel to the requirements of the cinema and (2) an object lesson in how a clever adapter can alter the meaning of a novel completely while remaining in almost all outward ways faithful to it...

...After all, they do it to the future, too...

...This is the best that movies can do with the past: they cannot put us into it in any but material ways, but they can take out of it what is universal instead of merely contemporary...

...Bates novels wondering the same thing...

...Bad Christians, Strong Women vs...

...This will never do...

...Orthodoxy, and so on and so forth—and still they carp and criticize...

...If riots then no martial law...

...Bad White Men, Good Indigenes vs...

...I suppose we shouldn't be too hard on Hollywood for this kind of exploitation of the past...

...Forget the theme of persuasion...

...In fact, for all that we can tell from this picture, it is TV, only shot with a hand-held (or, actually, head-held) camera with all its annoying jerkiness and a sound track with huffing and puffing and other sounds meant to signify authenticity...

...Interestingly, Lenny has to learn exactly the same lesson as the girls in Now and Then: not to live in the past...

...Of course, it goes without saying that it has nothing to do with Hawthorne...

...The figures of the Rev...

...Oh dear...

...Bad Colonizers, Good Animists vs...

...They content themselves with doing what the movies do so well in re-creating a period-1939 and circa 1900 respectively—but make the characters as recognizably of the period as the clothes and the machines...

...No far...

...Swayze's Jack, the mysterious proto-hippie drifter, romances Jeanne (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a young Korean War widow, teaches the Little League team of her son, Tommy (Joseph Mazello), how to win by playing Zen baseball and cures her other son, Gunny (Seth Mumy) of cancer...

...And what trouble it takes to get right the details of its period settings—the clothes, the cars, the shop-fronts, the advertisements, and the music (especially the music...

...This is no small thanks to the restraint of writers and directors and the acting skills of Vanessa Redgrave and Edward Fox in the former and Embeth Davidtz and Ben Chaplin in the latter...

...Now and Then by Lesli Linka Glatter recreates the summer of 1970 in the lives of four 12-year-old girls from Indiana who get back together in the present and reflect on the valuable life-lessons they learned at the time...

...Anne's unexpected triumph in spite of her ghastly family's best efforts was always part of what the novel was about...

...H [story to Hollywood does have one purpose: to flesh out nostalgia...

...But the film's real purpose is that nostalgic buzz which obliterates any possibility of learning from the past...

...But nobody minds much about this, for, just like time travel in the other direction, its real purpose is to affirm the Hollywood view of the present...

...Hester's big pregnant belly appears, it might as well have emblazoned on it the words: "As seen in Vanity Fair...

...The American Spectator December 1995 69...

...Poor old Hester was a bit of a dim star, really, until Demi came along to lend her some of her brightness...

...Ingrates...

...Papa and sisters are awful only so as to make poor Cinderella's recovery all the more brilliant, when it finally comes, with Anne and her captain embracing in the tawdry streets of Bath as a circus passes by...

...This is life," he says: "a piece of someone's life...

...CJ (James Bowman welcomes e-mail comments and queries on his reviews and can be reached at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...

...Zero...

...Bates novels, A Month by the Lake by John Irvin and A Feast of July by Christopher Menaul, are both very watchable for this reason alone...

...Obviously, such a theme would be a complete dead bust on the silver screen in the late twentieth century...

...N of so, of course, with Jane Austen...

...Here Joffe goes to all the trouble of dreaming up showcase examples for every sort of Hollywood political correctness—Good Indians vs...

...But on the other hand we have the example of poor Louisa Musgrove whom Captain Wentworth looks like settling on as a replacement partly on the grounds that she has the independence of mind and spirit that Anne had so sadly lacked—until he learns that the excess of this quality is called obstinacy and is A Bad Thing in a woman...

...Like Goofy and Mickey, they are stock figures from the cupboard of American iconography who can be taken out and adapted to pretty much any purpose that new program-writers can devise for them...

...To us the answer is self-evidently: Not at all...

...One has the impression that if one were to point out to Joffe and company that no real, historical Puritan woman would or could have uttered those words, they would respond: "So what's your point...

...But the film does interest me as an example of Tinseltown's approach to the past...

...Sick and Twisted Sexual Repression, Doctrinal Freedom vs...

...To be sure, it may be considered cheating a bit to be true to the novel in making Sir Walter (Corin Redgrave) and Elizabeth (Phoebe Nicholls) and Mary (Sophie Thompson) so truly, so unmitigatedly awful to Anne without the excuse that they had to forfeit their rights to advise and persuade her...

...The ticky-tacky suburban houses, and conformist suburban minds, the sharp definitions of sex roles and the way that that carries over into child rearing, the diet, the television, the smoking and drinking, the control mania and obsession with winning as they show up in children's sports—all these things come in for a pasting...

...It is like TV only worse...

...F or we all know that it will be strange when the millennium comes to an end...

...The date took over...

...Does it surprise you, for instance, that the villains in the film are rogue cops from the LAPD, vicious racists who execute anoble black rapper and revolutionary leader and then cover it up...

...You simply go to the prop room of movie futurism and bring out the Blade Runner stuff...

...To her there is a balance to be struck...

...But nearly everything else you might predict does...

...Two recent adaptations of H.E...

...Oldman and Moore themselves are also (and rather better-known) denizens of that cupboard, and when Demi-asJames Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Some high-tech mumbo jumbo together with the combination of riots in the streets and furious decadence among the beautiful people indoors is just about enough to do the job...

...Actually, you come away from H.E...

...Friendly Persuasion by James Bowman / t hardly seems worth the while of the movie critic of The American Spectator to bother trashing Roland Joffe's version of The Scarlet Letter—which may just be one of the five worst movies ever made—when so many liberal and politically correct critics have done the job before him...

...You put its tentacles on your head like a bad hairpiece, close your eyes, and get a rush that the film's hero, Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), describes as "not 'like TV only better'" but something altogether of a different order...

...Beginning with the credit: "Freely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne" and ending with an injunction to: "Read the Hyperion Book," it is meant to be a whole multi-media experience, like a Disney film, of all that the Hollywood consensus holds at the moment...

...What a paradise we would all have lived in in 1955 if only we had been more like we are now...

...But in the movies there is a lot to be said for living in the past rather than indulging in such cheap fictionalizations of the present...