Persuasion is an all-time disaster – how did Netflix get Jane Austen so terribly wrong?

Despite always finding something to enjoy in the mixed bag of past Austen adaptations, superfan Amanda Whiting was left bereft, confused and emotionally hollow by Dakota Johnson’s ‘Persuasion’

Miserable: Richard E Grant and Dakota Johnson in Netflix’s ‘Persuasion’ (Nick Wall/Netflix)

At first, everything seemed basically OK. As Netflix’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion opens, the music is solemn and vaguely symphonic, suitable to both century and situation. Even if you skipped reading this particular entry in the classic literature syllabus, you quickly get the gist: 19th century, the English countryside, the greatest depths of heartbreak ever recorded.

Anne Elliot – played by Dakota Johnson with a capable English accent that’s not enough to disguise the fact she comes from Hollywood royalty – fingers the grass, evoking a chaste sensuality. So far, so Georgian. Cosmo Jarvis’s Frederick Wentworth is all weathered skin and rugged stares and period-appropriate sideburns. Yes, at this point, adapting Austen’s celebrated final novel for the screen for the fifth time – and that’s only counting the English language versions, such as 2007’s Persuasion with Sally Hawkins and the 1995 BBC rendition – seems like it’s going to be just fine.

But around the 90-second mark something happens, slowly and then all at once. The sad melody gives way to a plucky, insistent cadence befitting a breezy Miss Marple mystery. Anne, moments ago exquisitely wistful, looks slyly down the camera, quipping that since breaking off her engagement to Wentworth she’s single and “thriving” – a word that occurs exactly zero times in Austen’s 1817 novel.

Bemoaning Hollywood’s obsession with pre-told tales is tiring at this point. My local cinema is currently showing a Marvel film (Thor), the fourth sequel to a children’s movie (Minions: The Rise of Gru), a belated sequel to a 1980s classic (the new Top Gun), and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Against this backdrop, a movie based on intellectual property that’s actually, you know, intellectual should be an oasis. Ambitious period adaptations bring new readers to old books. The best ones remove the distance between now and the past. They show that all the suffering and joy of being human has never really changed, even as human circumstances do. Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View remains the standard, while the excellent 1995 version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility – with a screenplay by Emma Thompson – is a close second.

But when the trailer for the new Persuasion was released in June, “Book Twitter” let out an almighty groan. Where to begin? There are misguided anachronisms, hideous pratfalls and smirks to camera that mostly reminded me of The Office. My personal favourite part (to hate) was the trailer’s billing of Jane Austen herself as “the author of Emma and Pride and Prejudice” – thanks for clearing that up! Instead of an oasis, this reimagining of Persuasion was shaping up to be a disconcerting mirage.

In the novel, Anne is a young Englishwoman whose family is forced by money troubles to rent out their stately home to an admiral and his wife. By coincidence, the wife’s brother is Wentworth. Providence has afforded him and Anne a second chance at marriage. Persuasion is generally regarded as Austen’s most mature novel, and Anne her most complicated heroine. The writer’s signature coolness and humour offset the protagonist’s desolation. If Hollywood is going to return time and again to the canon of English literature, this is a book to do it for.

In “updating” the story for contemporary ears, though, the Netflix version trades away its own potential for cheap grabs at relevance. “What if Anne Elliot was a bit more like Fleabag?” the film seems to ask. Anne describes her and Wentworth, a man she’s spent nearly a decade longing for, as “exes” – a term as ear-splittingly anachronistic as it is dreadfully casual. By making Anne sound more like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s acerbic invention, the film betrays its own shallow reading of the character, who, as written by Austen, actually is a bit like Fleabag – lonely, disaffected, and out of sync with society.

I’m fine with the idea that a bereft Anne Elliot, on some unwritten page of the novel, got a little boozy.

Plenty of period films and TV series have used anachronism to terrific effect. Dickinson, the Apple TV+ series about the early life of American poet Emily Dickinson, goes beyond just slapping a contemporary soundtrack on an old story. Its use of modern language is judicious; the more Emily is bristling against the confines of 19th-century womanhood, the more likely she is to call something “bullsh**” – a word that wouldn’t be invented until three decades after the poet’s death.

But in Persuasion, the anachronisms stir up an air of absurdity. Here are just some of the liberties taken with Austen’s text in the first five minutes: Anne glugs wine by herself, cries into the bathtub and throws herself face down onto her bed. I’m not suggesting that people in the 1800s didn’t do these things! I’m fine with the idea that a bereft Anne Elliot, on some unwritten page of the novel, got a little boozy. But it’s the way she does it here, like she’s performing her emotions for an Instagram reel. All that’s missing are crumpled tissues and Sleepless in Seattle playing on a TV in the background. In attempting to make Anne modern and relatable, she’s been left twee and unserious.

It goes on like this ad nauseam. The note Wentworth passes Anne in church just says “BORED!” like something a high schooler might text a friend. It turns out that since breaking off their engagement, a besotted Anne has been collecting Wentworth’s press clippings – essentially, she’s stalking his Facebook. The film is brimming with these cutesy parallels, each of which diminishes the reality of Anne’s sadness.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma (Focus Features / Miramax)

I have seen good Austen adaptations (2020’s Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy is a standout) and I have seen mediocre ones (1996’s Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow), but never before has an Austen adaptation left me so emotionally hollow. By insisting every aspect of modern life has a 19th-century corollary, the film decentres what makes period films so reliably affecting: no matter the decade, human emotions don’t evolve and love doesn’t get any easier.

As thrilled as I was to learn that Netflix was revisiting Austen, I now wish they’d left her alone. Imagine the teenage girl who sees the film and picks up the novel, only to discard it when she learns Austen didn’t anticipate the ins and outs of modern life. If Hollywood insists that my only choices are movies I’ve seen before, I’d rather take my chances on Tom Cruise. Top Gun 3, anyone?

‘Persuasion’ is streaming on Netflix now