I really didn't like the casting, or perhaps the direction of Anne. She's described in the book as sweet tempered, with an elegant mind. The only impression Anne in the movie left me with was "breathless." She's always out of breath and her mouth is hanging open in nearly every scene. Aggravating!
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There are so many things wrong with this adaptation, and having Anne be a mouth-breather with painfully slicked-back hair is only one of them.
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I'm inclined to think it was the direction. The portrayal of Capt. Wentworth was pretty bad too. Persuasion is my favorite Austin book, and it completely revolves around Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth. When you substitute two different characters, it's not the same story.
Anne in the book is intelligent and refined. She is often quiet, not because she's afraid to talk, or she doesn't feel that she has the right to speak, but because her family never listens to her. So why should she bother? Once Anne finds herself in the society of people who respect and listen to her she immediately opens up. Sally Hawkins, in this version, always seems to have this cowering posture, as though she doesn't deserve to have opinions or to even be there. She's basically an older Fanny Price.
I love Sally Hawkins and was excited about this adaptation. But when I saw it, and as I thought about it, I realised how untrue it was to the novel. Some of the breathlessness is part of Sally Hawkins's own style (see her in Happy-Go-Lucky) and part of it is that this adaptation is so short that she's required to run everywhere, always be agitated, and deliver a lot of information verbally that there was no time to convey in actions and situations. This version was disappointing on many fronts, its brevity affecting so many other aspects.
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