Handsome highbrow

While the season's new sit-coms vie for your attention, PBS and A&E are competing for the Sunday-night high ground. Masterpiece Theatre's second fall entry (the first, an adaptation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, aired last week) is the big-screen version of Jane Austen's Persuasion that opened back in October of 1995, to generally favorable reviews. That runs from 9 to 11 p.m. this Sunday (October 19) on WGBH (Channel 2). Over on A&E, yet another adaptation -- the sixth, by my count -- of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is premiering; it runs from 8 to 10:30 p.m.

Which to watch? If you're a Ciaran Hinds fan, you'll opt for Persuasion: he plays Captain Wentworth, the object of our heroine's affections. No, wait: it turns out Ciaran also plays the romantic lead in (this is the official A&E title) Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre -- he's Mr. Rochester. You can, of course, watch one while taping the other. If you and your VCR haven't yet attained that level of intimacy, you can catch this Jane Eyre in its "encore" presentation Tuesday (October 21) at 9 p.m. Consider too that Persuasion can be rented at your local video store (or you can buy it, a bargain at $18), and that A&E plans to make its Jane Eyre available on video next month.

You wouldn't go wrong with either one. Persuasion (written as the author was dying, of Addison's disease) isn't quite the equal of Pride and Prejudice or Emma: it's short (and short on humor), it's told entirely from the heroine's point of view (which limits its objectivity, and irony), and the abrupt dénouement doesn't afford the expected satisfying discomfiture of the dull and the deceitful (surely a large part of why we love Austen). But this cinematic version (a BBC/WBGH co-presentation) is persuasive because director Roger Michell cast the accomplished, unglamorous Amanda Root as the patient, good Anne Elliot, who's drifting toward middle age unloved by her father and two sisters and with no suitors in sight -- until suddenly she has three. Apart from some smooching in the street, Michell is faithful to the plot (Anne gets a second chance at the guy everyone persuaded her to refuse first time around) -- he even manages to conflate the two endings that Austen left. At first Hinds's Donald Sutherland-like captain hardly seems acute enough for our Anne, and Root herself is tight-lipped and plain-Jane unprepossessing (exactly like Austen herself). But they improve enormously on further acquaintance -- and so does the film, which even at a compact 104 minutes snares more of Austen's sensibility than the respectable but stagy four-hour 1971 BBC Persuasion with Ann Firbank and Bryan Marshall.

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (A&E wants to be sure you don't confuse it with Sidney Sheldon's Jane Eyre) follows on the 1934 film with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive, the 1944 film with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, the 1971 British TV-movie with Susannah York and George C. Scott, the 1983 BBC mini-series with Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton, and last year's Franco Zeffirelli film with Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt. No Austen novel has been the object of such attentions; neither has Wuthering Heights. At 107 minutes (the rest of the two and a half hours goes to commercials), this Jane Eyre is comparable to the Zeffirelli effort: cinematographically gorgeous, emotionally fulfilling, faithful to the plot (but rewriting dialogue and leaving out a lot of the texture), and civilized to a fault.

Director Robert Young (Fierce Creatures) is less flamboyant than Zeffirelli, a little truer to Brontë's Quakerish Christianity. Looking downright sinister in his moustache, Ciaran Hinds is a less boyish Rochester than Timothy Dalton or William Hurt, but it's harder to find his good points. Samantha Morton (who acquitted herself nobly as Harriet Smithson in A&E's outstanding Emma) is a moody, peculiarly touching Jane, with a touch less curiosity and sensuality than Charlotte Gainsbourg, a touch more resentment and proto-feminism. There's not a lot of chemistry between her and Hinds until the not-to-be-missed final scene, where (like Root) she flowers, all England in bloom. This Jane Eyre falls a little short of the Susannah York/George C. Scott version (still unavailable on video), but it's a shining three-and-a-half-star achievement, as is PBS's Persuasion. Reason enough to forsake The Simpsons and The X-Files for an evening.

-- Jeffrey Gantz