Valuation: 
Conviction, Netflix
This has been a bad week for people named Johnson. First the Prime Minister was ousted, now the beautiful Dakota Johnson (almost certainly unrelated), who has found fame as the masochistic Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades trilogy, sets us up from a very different form of torture in a truly horrific Netflix adaptation from Jane Austen’s wonderful novel Persuasion.
It’s hard to know where to begin to convey just how misguided this film is, to use an apt 18th-century word.
I watched it with my wife, who also happens to be a novelist named Jane and, more importantly, re-reads all of Austen’s books every five years.
She was really looking forward to it. After all, Persuasion has been relatively overlooked by filmmakers.
Conviction. (L to R) Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Frederick Wentworth
So if you don’t agree that Austen has generally been adapted to death and no longer needs new interpretations, her last completed novel is overdue.
Unfortunately, it can do without this kind of attention. Director Carrie Cracknell has left the theater to make her screen debut, and it shows – her film plays with its smug anachronisms and knowing looks at the camera, smirking at the audience.
I try not to be a stuffy traditionalist when it comes to Austen adaptations and historical drama in general. But the anachronisms here are so convulsively vaulted that they trigger a sort of personal groan that, in my case, reached its limit when Johnson referred to Captain Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) as Anne Elliot and gave her “a playlist” of favorite songs.
Anne is persuaded by her godmother, Lady Russell, to break off her engagement to Wentworth because he is socially inferior to her. But when she meets him again seven years later, she realizes that she loved him all along. Can she overcome the pain she caused him and rekindle their relationship?
Anne is said to have lost her “flowering” during these years. But Johnson’s sparkling, defiant Anne doesn’t look like she’s lost anything, except maybe her virginity, possibly to the Household Cavalry. She glows with a radiant confidence that is reinforced by her repeated, conspiratorial looks at the camera.
Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Wentworth in Persuasion
Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot in Persuasion
Again, I’m not instinctively opposed to this deliberate smashing of the so-called fourth wall. But it has to fit the character. Getting Anne to do it shows an almost willful misunderstanding of the book. Either that or Johnson is a disastrous miscast. Or rather both.
From start to finish, this woeful persuasion looks painfully hackneyed, as if Cracknell had compiled her own playlist of successful period dramas and decided to copy the most original bits. The multi-ethnic cast, for example, with Nikki Amuka-Bird as Lady Russell and Henry Golding as Anne’s ruthless relative William Elliot, looks like a direct steal from another hit TV, Bridgerton. Only Richard E Grant seems reasonably cast as Anne’s vain and goofy father, Sir Walter.
While Austen may have intended Anne to be from the West Country, she certainly did not mean a country as far west as the United States. Johnson pulls off a half-decent jab in a posh English accent, but at times her vowels sound disconcertingly Californian.
It’s hard to know where to begin to convey just how misguided this film is, to use an apt 18th-century word
The authors of this rot are Alice Victoria Winslow and Ron Bass, the latter a veteran Hollywood writer whose credits include Rain Man (1988) and My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and should therefore know better.
I don’t know which of them came up with that dreadful line: ‘They say if you’re a five in London you’re a ten in Bath’. At least that was the moment when my wife couldn’t take it anymore. Unfortunately, I had to fight on to the bitter end.
Persuasion is available on Netflix and in select theaters
miscast? Dakota Johnson as Anne, with Cosmo Jarvis as Wentworth