[8.7/10] One of the most frustrating and powerful things about stories set at the height of manners and propriety is that characters can’t just say what they mean. Particularly in matters of romance, there were such strictures and expectations, that true feelings could only be hinted at or gestured toward, instead of addressed directly. That can lead to irksome games of telephone or convoluted misunderstandings of intention and emotion.

The benefit to novelists like Jane Austen is that the form allowed her to put the reader in the characters’ heads, and mine the distance between what they could say and what they felt. But for film adaptations of those works, which can only replicate the same in clunkier voiceover, the benefit accrues to the actors, who have to communicate in looks and gestures what their characters words are forbidden to do more than graze.

That makes for the greatest feature of *Persuasion* the 2007 adaptation of the Austen original. Sally Hawkins plays Anne Elliot, the put upon middle child of a well-titled but reckless and frivolous family. Rupert Penry-Jones plays Captain Frederick Wentworth, who was Anne’s fiance eight years hence, until their romance was scuttled by well-intentioned outside interlopers given their young age and his meager prospects. Now, in the years since, the Elliots have fallen into debt; Captain Wentworth has made his fortune, and chance events let Anne and Frederick’s paths cross once more.

The social mores of the time, naturally, don’t permit them to simply hash out the regrets and hurt feelings from nearly a decade ago. Instead, we just see Anne’s nervous energy, the longing in her eyes when she looks upon her former beau, and the pain when she has to witness ignorant and oblivious friends and relations fawning and flirting with him. For Wentworth’s part, we see the quiet fury in each look he gives his one-time fiance, the subtle barbs he indirectly throws her way at a family dinner, and his own well of pained affection for her that he can’t fully suppress despite all his hurt.

Hawkins and Penry-Jones just kill it. Each scene they share in the first half of the film is positively electric. There’s a charged energy between them, one that cannot be communicated in dialogue exchanged, and so it fills the empty space of the emotional and societal distance that separates them. They are ghosts in one another’s lives, lurking at the edge of the frame, there only to haunt one another in ways that are unmooring but practically incorporeal.

That sort of painful apparition is particularly hard for Anne, given how much else she goes through in the first half of the film. To be frank, some parts of the film’s first reel can be difficult to watch. Her arc in the film is to go from being a kind-hearted but endlessly deferential young woman, to one who, in the most important matters at least, finds the strength to assert herself and pursue what she truly wants. But for that change to mean anything, we have to see the way her wants and needs are constantly disregarded by others, a plight secured through her initial timidity.

It’s tough to see her friends and family effectively pushing her around, whether through obliviousness or deliberately, as they take advantage of her yielding nature. Forcing her to see the man she still loves scorn her, receive the affections of those close to her, and suffering the unearned misfortunes that her flighty father and sister have inflicted upon her, makes you wonder if this is all an exercise in misery.

Of course it is, instead, a prelude to that change within Anne, a counterweight to the slow-spun joy and catharsis that follows as she discovers that Wentworth may still care for her and he realizes that she may have never stopped caring for him. The early hardships give way to a slow-spun, but no less affecting reconciliation between the two and, with it, the wins that Anne so richly deserves after all her deference.

Unfortunately, before that can happen, *Persuasion* includes any number of missed connections and near-tender moments interrupted at the last second. Much of this is simply more grist for the mill of romance -- the final coming together made all the sweeter by how many narrow misses preceded the possibility. But oftentimes it feels like an excessive and even unnecessary teasing of the audience.

That’s most plain in the presence of William Elliot, Anne’s wealthy cousin, the one-day inheritor of her father’s title, and an unexpected courter. Setting aside the modern day weirdness of seeing someone pursued by their cousin (He literally proposes to her by saying he hopes she never has to change her last name), William is a superfluous decoy romantic lead. He is more plot device than character here, representing the sort of money and lordship that Anne can set aside for love (and also money, mind you). He’s so extraneous that his secret evil scheme is delivered in quick exposition by a one-scene friend while Anne is literally running to her true love.

But *Persuasion*’s romantic force and delayed gratification works incredibly well despite that. Much of that comes from the impressively modern cinematography of the film. Director Adrian Sherhold and cinematographer David Odd shoot much of the film in stark lighting and with steadicams. That gives the piece a more grounded and lived-in feel that many statelier adaptations.

While the pair do still include gorgeous shots of stunning vistas and picturesque estates, more of their cinematic powder is spent in close-ups in low-lit rooms or rumbling shots that capture the authentic frenzy of events and emotions in a given moment. The movie has a much different feel than its contemporaries, a great deal of which owes to the visual approach, and lends itself to the potent internal character story at the heart of the film.

It also plays to the strengths of Hawkins and Penry-Jones, who thrive in the naturalistic atmosphere that puts the focus on their characters’ unspoken feelings. THere is an interiority at the core of both Anne and Frederick that is both crucial to the film and palpable in every interaction they have, with different people and with one another. For as much hay as the film makes from the scarred psyches and bitterness between in the first half, it makes up for in the latter half, when the pair rekindle their love for one another before they’re able to actually convey it.

It leads to such passion, in the moments where they share the screen, eager to confess their feelings, but unable to do so through interruption or circumstance. Anne’s race to the man she loves has tension and urgency because it represents the casting off of those mores, and the much-mentioned persuasions of her coterie. But it also has catharsis because it represents so much so deeply felt between her and Frederick, only now allowed to be made explicit.

That’s the cinch of stories ensconced in the limitations of propriety and polite society. They propel the dramatic irony between word and thought. They make room for outstanding performers to convey everything while saying nothing. And they offer the tremendous, heartening relief when what’s been forced into the dark corners of noble young minds and ignoble drawing rooms, is finally allowed into the light.