Persuasion (2022) - Unfashionably late to the party

Credit: allocine.fr

Since her death in 1817, one cannot say that Jane Austen has been short on reworkings of her novels. There have been literary spin offs (Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), cult 80s films loosely modelled around character archetypes (Amy Heckerling’s Clueless), and straight, clean cut adaptations that have left the world swooning (Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, featuring Matthew Macfadyen’s famous hand flex). Some have been happily welcomed, others disregarded and discarded. Perhaps it is that there have been too many. Perhaps it is that as a result, there has been an active effort to break the mould, to differentiate a new release from the previously established myriad of Austen Adaptations. The latest Persuasion, a Netflix original directed by Carrie Cracknell, could not have better epitomised this struggle.

Closely following Autumn de Wilde’s Emma., which strove to saturate and caricaturise Austen’s meddling protagonist, Persuasion is nevertheless another story altogether, a bobbing calamity that oscillates somewhere between serious period drama and modern day Bridget Jones. Dakota Johnson is perfectly adequate as the mournful Anne Elliot, pining over a long-lost love from over seven years ago. Desperate and romantic, she drinks wine from the bottle, clutching a white rabbit to her chest, and breaks the fourth wall repetitively, using one anachronism too many in the process. Her leading man is Cosmo Jarvis, whose performance is no doubt the worst of the lot, stiff, joyless, lacking in every quality an Austen hero needs. Richard E Grant’s debt-ridden Papa and Mia McKenna-Bruce’s rude and selfish sister Mary, annoyingly dismissive of her children to the point of cruelty (whether her childish and abusive attitude is supposed to be funny is a mystery) also fail to provide the supposed humour and depth Persuasion needs to be saved. The plot drags along, mistimed to the point that it is laughable: in one scene, Johnson and Jarvis are on the brink of rekindling their romance, put on hold eight years prior. In the next, she has disregarded him and moved on to Mr William Elliot (Henry Golding, and possibly the only actor in the entire film who has remembered to actually act). Whether it is the choice of modernisation, the cast or the bland cinematography, one wonders in the end what the point of it even was.