Persuasion film review: Dakota Johnson-starrer’s rom-com makeover for Jane Austen classic too plastic for impact

Language: English

It is always tricky business turning literature into a mainstream feature. Purists can be severe in assessment — a bitter pill director Carrie Cracknell had already tasted no sooner the trailer of her adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion dropped a while back. Many fans of Persuasion the novel snubbed the trailer and declared they would stay away from the film. The gist of their ire: Austen’s novel was a serious exploration of English society in the 1810s, fascinating in the way it dissected how the act of persuasion, whether justly or unjustly, was intrinsic to human interaction. The trailer, they felt, gave the impression the film was trivialising the novel, merely borrowing the story to create teenybopper mush with a slapstick edge in the guise of historical drama.

As Dakota Johnson gives Anne Elliot a Hollywood rom-com makeover, Cracknell’s cinematic interpretation of Persuasion tries setting up a mood that is indeed far from the book’s deeper intent. But what hardliners prone to engaging in the book-versus-film debate tend to forget is that film adaptations of books needn’t replicate a written work in entirety — that cinema being a medium unto itself should have the licence to reimagine an original written work in a novel way.

The problem with this film isn’t that it tries to render a tonal shift to a classic, the issue lies elsewhere. If Cracknell took a risk trying to turn Austen’s solemn text into fun fare she should have shown the audacity to go the whole hog. Persuasion struggles because its screenplay (Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow) seems caught between an ambition to cater nonconformist entertainment and an urge to retain the Austen essence. Perhaps there was a seed of something unusual in this attempt, but no one among the film’s creative team seems quite sure of how to go about it.

Dakota Johnson’s Anne Elliot is the middle daughter of a once-affluent family that has fallen on hard times. She is 27, in no way daddy’s favourite girl, and her folks are not quite impressed that is she is yet to get hitched. Anne has a back story — she was in love with the handsome Frederick Wentworth ( Cosmo Jarvis ) once, but she was persuaded, mainly by her late mother’s dear friend and family wellwisher Lady Russell ( Nikki Amuka-Bird ), to call off the affair. Back then, the idea was deemed beneath the Elliots to marry their daughter to Wentworth, a sailor without fortune. Eight years on, Captain Frederick Wentworth returns in Anne’s life as a wealthy and successful man, and an eligible bachelor. However, circumstances force them to keep quiet about their past.

Anne’s situation is meant to be executed with humour. In a bid to lighten up the narrative, the writers resort to oneliners that were perhaps better off as sitcom natter (“Now we’re worse than exes, we’re friends”). Most of the humour that propels the narrative is farcical, with scenes such as Anne, speaking to the camera (she does that a lot in film), philosophising over how she has “much, much further to fall” in life and then immediately tripping in a wooded path. Cosmo Jarvis tries acting out Wentworth with a Hugh Grant-esque stutter while Anne’s sisters Mary ( Mia McKenna-Bruce ) and Elizabeth (Yolanda Kettel) try outdoing each other in what appears like an effort to be comically obnoxious. The scene where Anne and Wentworth ‘meet’ after years is meant to generate big laughs — she is impersonating him with jam smeared above her upper lip in the form of a moustache and a bread basket for a navy hat to regale her nephews, without realising he is in the room. The sequence is too shoddily written to drive humour, just as what follows is supposed to remind of the sparks they once shared but doesn’t. Such a feeling is recurrent all through the film. Despite the focus on reinventing the original story as a romantic comedy, the narrative falls short of wit as well as scope for genuine chemistry between the lead pair.

The sub-par screenwriting baffles because the names associated with the project include Ron Bass, who shot to fame co-writing the Oscar-winning screenplay of the Dustin Hoffman - Tom Cruise starrer Rain Man . If the idea was to simplify a classic by reimagining it as feel-good fare for the wider audience, Bass and his collaborator Winslow fail to do so intelligently. Generic experimentation of classics, besides running the hazard of puritanical scrutiny, invariably involves walking the razor’s edge because it demands balancing the context of the original work with the novelty that the recreated effort might want to introduce. Bass and Winslow’s storytelling overtly focusses on setting up cute drama around the Anne-Wentworth romance, neglecting the fact that Austen’s original work was at the same time also a comment on class divide, gender disparity and patriarchal chauvinism. Anne’s struggle against these odds is meant to be representative of the era.

Director Cracknell, with two decades of experience as a successful theatre director in Britain, would seem like a natural choice for an experimentation on Austen. Cracknell had interpreted Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House for screen around a decade ago and the effort garnered acclaim. With Persuasion, she misses out on capturing the timeless appeal of the story’s backdrop and characters as she tries forcing cool vibes into the narrative. The outcome is unconvincing. Cracknell’s experiment is too plastic for impact.

If Anne, Wentworth and their love story fails to connect, the prop cast suffers owing to weak writing, too. The veteran Richard E. Grant is wasted in an indifferently reimagined Sir Walter Elliott, Anne’s arrogant father. Henry Golding as Anne’s other suitor, the opportunist distant cousin William, as well as the other actors playing out the novel’s assortment of characters look and behave like protagonists from cheesy Hollywood rom-coms of the nineties dressed up in period costumes.

The film is rated as suitable for seven-plus viewing on OTT. Perhaps it was pitched as one of those ‘classics made cool’ attempts apparently meant to initiate the social media-addicted generation to the ‘real stuff’. That is a bit like saying tinny remixes can help today’s crowd understand and appreciate classic Bollywood songs better.

Rating: * * (two stars)

Persuasion is streaming on Netflix

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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