CRAIG BROWN: You’ll never persuade me to see Persuasion
Back in 2019, Jacob Rees-Mogg tentatively dipped a toe in the waters of authorship only to find his foot bitten off.
He had written a book called The Victorians. Three of our greatest historians considered it balderdash. ‘At least we know The Victorians isn’t ghost-written,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes, ‘since no self-respecting freelancer would dare ask for payment for such rotten prose.’
Dominic Sandbrook thought the book’s ‘plodding, Pooterish style’ so dreadful that he found himself questioning its authorship. ‘Did Rees-Mogg really write this?’ he asked. ‘Or did he get the work-experience boy to do it? In any case, the overall effect is soul-destroying. There have been many books on the Victorians, but surely none as badly written.’
A.N. Wilson — whose own book on the Victorians is generally acknowledged as a masterpiece — listed a number of errors before concluding that ‘the author is worse than a twit’. Rees-Mogg’s book would, he added, be ‘anathema . . . to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense’.
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Did Rees-Mogg learn his lesson? One can only hope that the new Prime Minister, whomever he or she may be, will have enough sympathy for the British reading public to offer Rees-Mogg a particularly busy position in Cabinet.
Rees-Mogg’s Victorians had at least earned itself the distinction of Greatest Turkey. But, three years on, the reviews of a new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion have been even worse.
The New Statesman’s Anna Leszkiewicz said that the film ‘provided me with 107 excruciating minutes of viewing’. The Times called it ‘a chaotic mess’. Slate called it ‘a soggy mess of limp rom-com cliches’ and ‘one of the worst movies in recent memory’.
GQ suggested it could be ‘the worst film of the year’. The Observer’s Wendy Ide called the production ‘tone-deaf . . . demonstrating so little sensitivity to the delicate precision of Austen’s writing that you wonder why she [director Carrie Cracknell] didn’t go the whole hog and bung in some comedy trombone quacks and an audience laugh track’.
In this paper, my colleague Brian Viner found it ‘truly dreadful’, ‘painfully derivative’, ‘lamentable’ and ‘rot’. Nor did it fare much better in America. The LA Times wondered whether the scriptwriter had ‘lifted sentences from the novel and fed them through some kind of Instagram-filtering, catchphrase-generating, text-summarising idiot bot’.
This appears to be one of those cases, like Rees-Mogg’s Victorians, where the reviews are much more enjoyable than the work reviewed. And more inventive, too: ‘This isn’t one of those films that’s so bad it’s good. Instead, it’s so bad it’s boring. It may be the longest one hour and 49 minutes of your life,’ wrote my favourite critic, Deborah Ross, in The Spectator.
The new Persuasion was, she said, ‘truly horrible. I would also add that everyone involved should probably be sent to prison. Not for life, but until we could be confident they’d learned the error of their ways and there was minimal risk of reoffending . . . I never got the sense that anyone involved had actually read the book, but maybe they’ll get round to it while in prison?’
There is something exhilarating about a truly lacerating review. It offers the same sense of exhilaration as diving head-first into a cold pool after spending too long in a fuggy sauna. Virtuous souls may fuss that these reviews contain a touch of sadism, but that is a bit like complaining that ice cream is a bit cold, or the Atlantic a trifle damp.
Deborah Ross said in The Spectator that the new Persuasion was: ‘truly horrible. I would also add that everyone involved should probably be sent to prison’
Noel Coward was once in the audience of a play in which the child actress Bonnie Langford and a horse performed together onstage. He already wasn’t enjoying it, but then things took a turn for the worse when the horse started to defecate.
‘If they’d stuffed the child’s head up the horse’s a***, they would have solved two problems at once,’ he said.
It was cruel, but it was funny. Cruelty is often the price we pay for laughter, and most of us think it a price worth paying. Given the choice of slogging our way through nearly two hours of an inept and misconceived film of Persuasion, or cackling over a jaunty selection of its most damning reviews, which of us would choose the film?
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