This groanworthy Jane Austen outing is torture: BRIAN VINER reviews Persuasion
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Persuasion, Netflix
This has been a bad week for people called Johnson. First, the Prime Minister was ousted, now the lovely Dakota Johnson (almost certainly no relation), having sprung to fame as masochistic Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades trilogy, subjects us to an altogether different form of torture in a truly dreadful Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s wonderful novel Persuasion.
It’s hard to know where to start in con-veying just how misbegotten, to use a suitably 18th century word, this film is.
I watched it with my wife, who happens to also be a novelist called Jane, and, more to the point, re-reads all of Austen’s books every five years or so.
She was looking forward to it enormously. After all, Persuasion has been relatively overlooked by filmmakers.
Persuasion. (L to R) Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Frederick Wentworth
So, unless you’re of the view that Austen generally has been adapted to death and needs no more new interpretations, her last completed novel is overdue some attention.
This kind of attention, regrettably, it can do without. Director Carrie Cracknell has crossed from the theatre to make her screen debut and it shows – her film plays smirkingly to the audience, with its smug anachronisms and knowing glances at the camera.
I try not to be a dusty traditionalist regarding Austen adaptations, and period dramas in general. But the anachronisms here are so wincingly arch that they trigger a kind of personal groan-o-meter, which in my case reached its limit when Johnson, as Anne Elliot, referred to Captain Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) giving her ‘a playlist’ of favourite songs.
Anne is persuaded by her godmother, Lady Russell, to break her engagement to Wentworth on the grounds that he is her social inferior. But on meeting him again seven years later she comes to realise she has loved him all along. Can she overcome the hurt she caused him and rekindle their relationship?
In those intervening years Anne is meant to have lost her ‘bloom’. But Johnson’s sparky, defiant Anne doesn’t look like she’s lost anything, except maybe her virginity, possibly to the Household Cavalry. She shimmers with radiant self-confidence, which is compounded by her repeated, conspiratorial looks to camera.
Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Wentworth in Persuasion
Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot in Persuasion
Again, I’m not instinctively against this deliberate shattering of the so-called fourth wall. But it has to be consistent with character. Making Anne do it shows an almost wilful misunderstanding of the book. Either that, or Johnson is disastrously miscast. Or both, more likely.
From start to finish, this lamentable Persuasion looks painfully derivative, as if Cracknell has made her own playlist of successful period dramas and resolved to copy the most original bits. The multi-ethnic cast, for example, with Nikki Amuka-Bird as Lady Russell, and Henry Golding playing Anne’s unscrupulous kinsman William Elliot, looks like a direct steal from another TV hit, Bridgerton. Only Richard E Grant as Anne’s vain and silly father, Sir Walter, seems sensibly cast.
Moreover, while Austen possibly intended Anne to hail from the West Country, she certainly didn’t mean a country as far west as the United States. Johnson makes a half-decent stab at a posh English accent, but every now and then her vowels sound disconcertingly Californian.
It’s hard to know where to start in con-veying just how misbegotten, to use a suitably 18th century word, this film is
The writers of this rot are Alice Victoria Winslow and Ron Bass, the latter a veteran Hollywood scribe whose credits include Rain Man (1988) and My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and who should therefore know better.
I don’t know which of them came up with the ghastly line, ‘It is said that when you’re a five in London, you’re a ten in Bath’. Either way, that was the moment when my wife could bear it no longer. I, alas, had to soldier on to the bitter end.
Persuasion is on Netflix and in select cinemas
Miscast? Dakota Johnson as Anne, with Cosmo Jarvis as Wentworth
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