Persuasion

Purists will sneer, but the latest colour-blind Jane Austen rehash is a lively, entertaining concoction for the teenage at heart.

Persuaded otherwise: Lydia Rose Bewley, Richard E. Grant, Dakota Johnson and Yolanda Kettle

Jane Austen may prove to be more formulaic than her literary cousins William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, but she knew how to whip up a good yarn. And there are few things more throat-choking than the spectacle of two articulate people who patently adore each another but don’t possess the socially acceptable vocabulary to express it. Think Elisabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, Emma Woodhouse and Mr Knightley, Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, Anne Elliott and Frederick Wentworth... Of course, Ms Austen was much more than the purveyor of a rattling good love story, but a canny commentator of the snobbism and social mores of her time. And while Carrie Cracknell's sprightly and entertaining adaptation fine-tunes the social satire with needle-like precision, the colour-blind casting throws a discombobulating light on the proceedings. However, a good story should be able to withstand the ravages of the decades (and centuries) and as people of whatever hue or gender continue to find themselves tongue-tied in love, a narrative like Persuasion will find its traction.

Once, long ago, Anne Elliott, the daughter of a self-absorbed snob, was besotted with a man called Frederick Wentworth. But, “he was a sailor without rank or fortune – and I was persuaded to give him up.” Certainly, Cracknell's film – from an effervescent screenplay by Ronald Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow – gets off to a more engaging start than Austen’s own 1817 tome. Austen begins chapter one with the eminently forgettable line: “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage…” and it goes on. Here, Anne, brimming with anguished humour and irony, courtesy of Dakota Johnson, starts the ball rolling by announcing, “I almost got married once.”

No doubt purists will balk at the anachronisms. I’m sure the line delivered by Captain Harville (Edward Bluemel), describing his friend Wentworth, was not from Austen’s original text: “He [Wentworth] could be an admiral some day, be great service to the Crown and all that it holds dear, but instead he’d rather fart around inland.” Likewise, when Mary describes her younger sister Mary as a “total narcissist,” it sounds more Sally Rooney than Jane Austen. Nonetheless, this is a Netflix production and is clearly aimed at a younger breed of sofa romantic. Thus it adopts a post-modern, Fleabag-infested mantle, in which characters knowingly clock the camera with a calculating look. Dakota Johnson provides both fun and gravitas as the staple Austen heroine, and is well supported by a lively cast of fresh faces and Richard E. Grant. Mia McKenna-Bruce supplies a gallery of understated, well-tuned reaction shots as sister Mary, while Nia Towle is scintillating as Anne’s close friend Louisa Musgrove. But it’s the underrated Cosmo Jarvis as Wentworth, who holds Anne’s heart dear, who anchors the film in its romantic possibility.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Henry Golding, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Richard E. Grant, Ben Bailey Smith, Yolanda Kettle, Nia Towle, Izuka Hoyle, Edward Bluemel, Stewart Scudamore, Agni Scott, Lydia Rose Bewley, Afolabi Alli, Eve Matheson, Janet Henfrey, Jordan Long. 

Dir Carrie Cracknell, Pro Andrew Lazar and Christina Weiss Lurie, Screenplay Ronald Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, Ph Joe Anderson, Pro Des John Paul Kelly, Ed Pani Scott, Music Stuart Earl, Costumes Marianne Agertoft, Dialect coaches Jill McCullough and Helen Simmons.  

MRC/Bisous Pictures/Mad Chance/Fourth and Twenty Eight Films-Netflix.
108 mins. USA. 2022. UK and US Rel: 15 July 2022. Cert. PG.