Taking on Jane Austen’s final and often less celebrated work, Netflix’s Persuasion is the latest remake to grace the screen.
★✰✰✰✰
Adaptations of Jane Austen novels aren’t a rare sight. Every few years a new one pops up as a director decides that their take on Pride and Prejudice will be better than the plethora already in existence. Whether they’re staying close to the novel or reimagining the plot in a new setting, there’s always an audience for Austen.
Persuasion tells the story of Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson), who reconnects with a lost love after seven years apart. There’s miscommunication, unrequited pining, and meddlesome romantic rivals—a classic romantic cocktail that should be hard to get wrong. However, the film’s first look received a somewhat trepidatious reception, with fans of the novel lamenting the modernised, ‘dumbed-down’ dialogue and others being unsure of the story’s ‘Fleabagification’, with Dakota Johnson breaking the fourth wall to give let us know her thoughts on proceedings. However, this was not a death knell for the production. Several adaptations’ deviations from the source material have worked; 1995’s Clueless no doubt loses the literary integrity of Emma but remains well-loved and memorable.
Persuasion’s choice to adapt the original dialogue to strange twenty-first-century tinged millennial-speak is less successful and only serves to undermine the plot. The film vacillates wildly between speech that, while it may not be historically accurate, is at least not aggressively of the moment. Persuasion ignores the beauty and nuance of Austen’s work in favour of an odd hybrid that is neither here nor there, not committing to an authentic nor modernised script.
The relationship between Anne and Wentworth is central to the plot, yet lacks chemistry. Their first reconnection, written to be awkward, uncomfortable banter somehow misses the mark, and their subsequent interactions have all the ingredients for a slow-burn romance but fall flat. Cosmo Jarvis’s Wentworth does not have the clumsy charm of Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice 2005) or the exasperated charisma of Johnny Flynn’s Mr. Knightley (Emma 2020), something not helped by the uninspiring script. This lack of tension makes the entire affair seem juvenile and inconsequential, the stakes so low that it’s hard to engage with the plot. Henry Golding has far more chemistry with Johnson than her leading man, with his portrayal as rival suitor Mr. Elliot lighting up the screen in contrast to his costars. Similarly, Richard E. Grant steals the show in his few scenes as Anne’s father. However the supporting cast cannot save the bland performances of the leads, with the film becoming long stretches of nothing occasionally punctuated by a somewhat lively appearance from one of the two.
There’s an attempt to make Anne a relatable, everywoman figure. She’s a fun aunt character to her nephews, rolls her eyes at her two-dimensionally shallow family, and enjoys a good glass of wine. For much of the film she’s either drinking, nursing a hangover at the kitchen table, or flopping around lamenting her long lost love. Somewhat reminiscent of Bridget Jones, she’s a bit of a mess, but one carefully designed to be someone we can sympathise with.
Yet Johnson’s Anne has little personality, speaking in a lethargic, monotonous whisper and never really connecting with the audience in spite of her frequent asides to the camera. Of course, it’s impossible for anything on the big or small screen to break the fourth wall without being likened to Fleabag, but Persuasion only highlights how masterfully Phoebe Waller-Bridge used the device. Particularly in its first third the film severely overuses the technique, disrupting the rhythm of the narrative and failing to add either humour or emotional depth to it.
The Verdict
Watching Persuasion feels like watching the first draft of an amateur drama production, one that hasn’t quite found its angle or worked out its kinks. Fans of Austen will likely feel let down by the lack of respect for the original novel, whilst newcomers may be put off entirely from watching or reading any Austen-related work again. There is no shortage of Austen adaptations out there, and there will undoubtedly be far more in the future. Watch one of those instead.
Words by Lucy Carter
Support The Indiependent
We’re trying to raise £200 a month to help cover our operational costs. This includes our ‘Writer of the Month’ awards, where we recognise the amazing work produced by our contributor team. If you’ve enjoyed reading our site, we’d really appreciate it if you could donate to The Indiependent. Whether you can give £1 or £10, you’d be making a huge difference to our small team.