Persuasion: Dakota Johnson in a Jane Austen Adaptation is Decidedly Unpersuasive
By Liam Lacey
Rating: D
"My idea of good company” says Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, is “clever well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”
The new Netflix adaptation of the book, which stars Dakota Johnson, is not good company. A wearying spoof, the film, with its Regency-era setting, takes a smart, sombre drama and turns it into a juvenile inanity.
Johnson’s big eyes and power-flirt smirk are always interesting to watch. But she’s not easy to buy as an English rom-com klutz, speaking in asides to the audience in the mold of an Austen-derived Brigitte Jones’s Diary or Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag.
Eight years before the film starts, Anne tells us, she missed her chance on the marriage-go-round when her godmother Lady Russell (Nikki Amuka-Bird) persuaded her to dump Frederick Wentworth, a handsome sailor and the only man who “really saw” her.
The trouble was, he was not in possession of a good fortune. Or, for those who like dialogue to come embedded with explanatory footnotes, Lady Russell puts it this way: “The truth is, marriage is transactional for women…”
Now Anne spends her time being rolling her eyes by her snobbish family at the dinner table, guzzling “fine wine” from the bottle, crying in the bath or obsessively stroking her pet bunny because, you know, a kitten might be too obvious.
Then opportunity hammers on her door again. Since the breakup, Anne’s and Wentworth’s fortunes have reversed. Anne’s father, the preening widower Sir Walter Elliot (Richard E. Grant, funny, if over-the-top) is a spendthrift so the family must rent out the family’s home, Kellynch Hall. (The family manse that appears to be the size of a factory, though in other respects, costumes and hair are loose and casual to be relatable to contemporary audiences).
The Elliots will have to move to cheaper digs in the resort town of Bath. The extended family group includes Anne’s stuck-up older sister Elizabeth (Yolanda Kettle) and her companion, the young widow, Penelope Clay (Lydia Rose Bewley), who hopes to flatter Sir Walter into marrying her.
Anne, the overlooked middle daughter, is sent to nearby Lyme to help her married younger sister, Mary Musgrove (Mia McKenna-Bruce, who’s a bit of a scene thief). Anne says she’s “a total narcissist” though Mary claims, “The thing about me is, I’m an empath” which is why she can’t care for her kid when he breaks his arm.
The Musgrove clan are a model of successfully not setting your goals too high. There’s dad Charles (Ben Bailey Smith), who spends a lot of time hunting, a couple of kids, and Charles’ two marriage-age sisters, Luisa (Nia Towle) and Henrietta (Izuka Hoyle).
The Musgroves, apart from Mary, are Black, a colour-blind casting choice that follows the lead of a couple of other 19th-century set adaptations, Armond Iannuci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield and the Austen-derived Netflix series, Bridgerton.
The new tenants at Kellynch Hall turn out to be Wentworth’s sister and brother-in-law. Wentworth, who has now risen to the status of naval captain, is a frequent visitor, and he and Anne’s paths cross again, initially with great awkwardness before the inevitable reconciliation.
Perhaps he will fall for the pretty Luisa Musgrove, who’s seriously crushing on him, though it’s not easy to grasp the appeal. As played by Cosmo Jarvis (Peaky Blinders), the Captain isn’t just reserved. He behaves as though he has been cryogenically frozen.
More provocative and handsome is smarmy player Mr. William Elliot (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding), a distant cousin who is in line to inherit the family estate and who makes a self-interested play for Anne. Golding’s very good but the script elides his nefarious backstory, which kills the character’s intrigue.
All this is too clumsy and smug to excuse as escapist froth. Certainly, it’s reasonable to glean contemporary sentiments from Austen’s book, a lively novel full of astringent observations about gender, the tyranny of social pressures and the quest for intelligent love between equals.
Even a silly adaptation doesn’t have to mean stupid. Take Fire Island, a gay Asian-American take on Pride and Prejudice, currently streaming on Disney Plus and a film which feels closer to the spirit of Austen’s tartly observed 19th century comedies of manners than this trifle.
Persuasion. Directed Carrie Cracknell. Starring Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Richard E. Grant, Henry Golding, Ben Bailey-Smith, Yolanda Kettle, Nia Towle, and Izuka Hoyle. Available on Netflix beginning July 15.