Persuasion Review: Netflix’s Adaptation Is More Fleabag Than Jane Austen

Jane Austen was critical of but ultimately ambivalent toward 18th-century social propriety and the conventions and strictures of marriage for women. But the modern-day veneration of the English author as the patron saint of romantic comedies proves that celebration often comes with simplification, what with the adaptations of her work often reducing her worldview to mere resistance to settling down. The latest adaptation of Austen’s final and most mature novel, Persuasion, is among the most egregious examples of the disservice that this reductiveness has done to her themes and prose.

As in the novel, the protagonist of Carrie Cracknell’s film is Anne Elliott (Dakota Johnson), who’s entered spinsterhood at the ripe old age of 27. Daughter of an aristocratic, she once had the chance to marry a debonair young sailor named Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis), only to be coerced into rejecting him because he was below her social station. This decision has weighed on her for nearly a decade, leaving Anne to obsess over what might have been as her family grows more and more restless about her marriage prospects.

That, though, is where the similarities between the Anne of the novel and the Anne of this film effectively end. Austen’s conception of the woman upends the precocity and impertinence that informed the protagonists of Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Slightly older and more resigned than Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, the quiet agony that Anne feels at being reintroduced to a now-wealthy Frederick lays bare Austen’s feelings about the desperate desire for true love to be the bedrock of marriage instead of the elaborate social rules that govern it.

But as written here, Johnson’s Anne slips into the modern vogue for awkward but witty women whose arrested development is a sign of both their stasis and sophistication. The ultimate purveyor of this sort of characterization is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, whose influence is felt in the way that Anne is constantly smirking, as well as in her direct asides to the viewer.

Stylistically, the film awkwardly vacillates between modes: specifically that of the mostly static, stately Austen adaptations that the BBC churned out in the 1990s and the modern rom-coms that are increasingly leaning into tight, fast-paced, and often incomprehensible editing. Generic compositions of sunlit manor walls are broken up by split-second insert shots of characters’ reactions to a particularly barbed or suggestive line, with Anne often throwing a conspiratorial glance at the camera. An action as simple as someone answering the door involves more than six shots each lasting less than a second, imbuing a false sense of antic mania to a story that still moves at the deliberate pace of an Austen novel.

So bewildering is this approach that even when the film, as written by Ronald Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, does adhere to the more tender, ruminative, mournful quality of the book, it makes the most accurate representations of the text feel out of place. Johnson’s performance finds solid footing when she isn’t incessantly winking and her character is making vulnerable attempts at reconciliation with Frederick. These moments tend to involve the pair, in cliché fashion, standing off alone on a beach staring wistfully into the distance and admitting their mutual regrets, but the muted agony that hangs between them is palpable.

Elsewhere, there are scenes that ardently pull off the modernization that the filmmakers are attempting while at the same time respecting the essence of Austen’s text. For one, in describing Frederick before their reunion, Anne says, “He listens with his whole body. It’s electric,” with the heavy emphasis on that last word speaking to just how starved women are, and have long been, to have their intellect acknowledged by their suitors.

But these flashes of depth are few and far between in an adaptation so misguided that it can barely bring itself to broach the questions of class that are inseparable from the main characters’ romantic travails. This Persuasion doesn’t hide the role that Frederick’s common birth plays in keeping him and Anne apart, but apart from a second-half battle between him and Anne’s rich, smug cousin, William (Henry Golding), for her hand in marriage, most of the signs of class-consciousness are confined to early scenes that render the stuffy superiority of Anne’s bankrupt father, Sir Walter Elliot (Richard E. Grant), as parody.

In reducing Walter to a spoof, the film dulls his more sinister qualities, chiefly his caustic resentment of the social mobility of an ascendant mercantile class whose financial windfalls are practically a mockery of his dwindling fortune. Though a side character, Walter is perhaps the true key to Persuasion, the embodiment of all the ossified barriers that stand between Anne and Frederick. Those obstacles give the novel’s happy conclusion a bittersweet tinge, whereas here you’d hardly guess that a decade of lost time still hangs over the lovers.