Modern Persuasion with a deadly message
Good point in this review of Persuasion: Netflix, like the other streaming platforms, is mostly producing content for us to be (vaguely and mildly) entertained while we do other things. It's sad to see Austen used as fodder for such a project, but as Kayleigh Donaldson says, public domain material helps the production bottom line.
So a big part of what seems so objectionable in the new Persuasion, if the reviews I've read are correct, can actually be attributed to sheer laziness and dare I say cheapness of the enterprise, in which the viewers and consumers are complicit when we accept our part of the contract: that we won't pay attention.
Fine.
I just want to warn against the message conveyed at the end of the trailer, be it ever so ubiquitous and not limited to this disaster of a remake: "Don't let anyone tell you how to live -- or who to love."
Well, if we are honest, we can look around and see that if there were more guardians burdened by their duty to guide the young in our society, we'd be better off. This is on my mind right now due to a tragic event in my own community. Yes, girls! Let those who love you help you!
A lazy production can't help having a lame world view, but this one can destroy happiness. Those who read the book (perhaps belatedly, while in jail for their cinematic crimes?) know that Anne Eliot actually loves and respects -- and understands and even forgives! -- Lady Russell and her motives for directing her young charge away from her attachment to Captain Wentworth. The subsequent, more mature recovery of their love is the result, as always with Austen, of a rational attachment. It's only our modern sensibility that sees conflict in the connection between reason and love.
But a young woman who thinks, because her ideas of love are formed by the entertainment industry, that there is no danger to her happiness and even her life in being left without counsel regarding how to live and who to love (whom, really, but let it pass) is being sadly and even fatally misguided. Miss Jane thought so, even while she admitted that Lady Russell was mistaken. Erring is not as bad as not making the effort!
(I heartily recommend this book for a deeper investigation into Jane Austen's real view of romantic love: The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Kantor. Delightful in its complete grounding in the novels and clarifying for the perplexed.)