Persuasion was the last book Jane Austen wrote before she died. It’s about losing love and finding it again and defying your awful family, etc, like some classic literature shit. Anne’s delusional family told her to reject the marriage proposal of the sailor she was in love with because he was poor and they weren’t. Ten years later, when she’s almost 30 and pretty much an old maid, her family’s still delusional but now not as rich, Anne has lead a very sad lonely life, the sailor is now a captain and has tons of money, and Anne has to watch him rub it in her face about what she missed out on as her sister’s in-laws fall all over themselves trying to get him to marry one of them. He realizes, of course, that revenge is pointless because he still loves her, and she still loves him, and omg her family is essentially abusive so no wonder she’s so effed, and he asks her to marry him, the end.

Persuasion, the tv-movie adaptation from 2007 is about the woman from Happy-Go-Lucky

attempting to look sad

- probably due to her extremely painful hairdo -

and running a whole lot

after her former almost fiancee

who’s stopped over from his frat house to invite Anne’s awful sister

Mary’s sister-in-law Conan O’Brien

and her suicidal sister Louisa

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to help him rub it in that Anne is a loser

before finally deciding to get back together with her after she goes blind.

I mean, approximately.

Actually, they did totally eff up the story in the following three ways.

1. The Casting

Happy-Go-Lucky was a great movie. Sally Hawkins was great in Happy-Go-Lucky. I don’t think actors should be pigeon-holed into roles, but SH is so much better suited to someone who sees the joy in life as opposed to someone who’s been lonely and sad and treated like crap by her entire awful family for the past ten years, whose only glimmer of hope came and went quickly, and came back again only to taunt her.

Plus, Capt. Wentworth up there is supposed to be bitter, hardened, angry, out for a little bit of revenge, and has been on a boat for the past ten years. What kind of sunscreen did this guy have? He looks great.

But, Mary. Oh, Mary. Mary, Anne’s younger and only married sister, is conceited and constantly disappointed with her life. Her in-laws don’t like her because she’s annoying, but she thinks they owe her a lot more respect, and her husband ignores her because she’s a shrew. She pretends to be ill in order to get attention and is conniving when it comes to who her young sisters-in-law should marry, though it’s really none of her business since both their parents are alive.

Once upon a time, I got a BS in special education. This is true. So I spent a lot of this movie trying to figure out what special needs Mary has.

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My conclusion is that she’s just generally deranged. There is no help I can give her.

2. The Letter

At the end of the story, Capt. Wentworth overhears a conversation between Anne and a mutual friend where she’s all, “I’m still obvs in love with someone from my past,” and Wentworth writes a letter that’s all, “Serious? ‘Cause if I heard you right, you’re in love with me, and I’m in love with you AWESOME,” and then he makes sure she gets the letter before he leaves and she reads it and goes down to tell her brother-in-law to find Wentworth and tell him that she wants him to come back to her house later for a party, “make sure you wink at him a lot, dude, it’ll get the point I’m trying to make across,” but her brother-in-law is, like, “I have errands to run, and Wentworth has been hanging around outside the front door of your house for the past ten minutes, so why don’t you just tell him yourself?” and then they get married.

In this movie, Anne has the conversation (which is the only solid indication that Wentworth has that Anne really didn’t want to give him up ten years ago, and still wants him back) but Wentworth isn’t there to hear it. And Anne gets the letter (which contains the phrasing from the book, including the part about how he overheard her, but he didn’t overhear anything) while she’s already on some weird jog through the town to find him, but without ever having read the letter, she never would have known that he wanted her back. I’m not one of those people who thinks that movie adaptations can’t take artistic license, but it’s kind of the climax. Which is kind of the important part of the story. Kind of.

3. The Kiss

There are some truly bad movie kisses. This might be the worst. Anne runs through Bath searching for Capt. Wentworth, running into about thirty people on the way who keep sending her in different directions like she’s playing some kind of poorly designed board game. When she finally finds him, it takes them about three hours to just kiss each other already, because I guess the person who directed this movie reeeeally liked Dawson’s Creek.

The description on YouTube says that the actor playing Wentworth thought it was the steamiest kiss he ever did on screen. Ew. Even with the spittle?

But what do I know? There are currently fan videos for Persuasion on YouTube set to I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, Moonlight Sonata (?), Right Here Waiting, Wait for You, Back for Good, Chasing Cars, When You Say Nothing At All, I’ll Never Get Over You (Getting Over Me), Light Up My Life, What About Love, How to Save a Life,  It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, My Immortal, What About Now, Because You Loved Me, and I Will Remember You, so I’m obviously missing something.

I’m almost convinced, but not quite. When a fan vid is made using the Heart song All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, then I’ll concede: best period piece ever.