Cast: Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Richard E. Grant, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Henry Golding, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Nia Towle, Yolanda Kettle, Lydia Rose Bewley, Edward Bluemel, Afolabi Alli. Screenplay: Ron Bass, Alice Victoria Winslow, based on a novel by Jane Austen. Cinematography: Joe Anderson. Production design: John Paul Kelly. Film editing: Pani Scott. Music: Stuart Earl.
Persuasion is not as bad as I’d heard. I knew it had been described as a kind of mashup of Bridgerton (non-traditional casting) and Fleabag (breaking the fourth wall), and that Austenites were appalled. There are two ways to adapt a classic novel to film: follow it as faithfully as you can, reproducing the substance of the story and the milieu in which it takes place, or use the story as a springboard for a modern adaptation – e.g. the translation of Emma into Clueless or of Pride and Prejudice into Fire Island. Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion falls somewhere in between, taking the bones of the Austen novel and its Regency setting, and viewing them through a contemporary sensibility. It doesn’t work here, but it might have. Armando Iannucci came closer with his Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), which also used non-traditional casting (including Persuasion’s Nikki Amuka-Bird) and has a 21st-century sensibility clearly operating throughout. Iannucci may have succeeded in part because he didn’t go as far as Persuasion’s screenwriters in mixing today’s casual speech with the author’s period dialogue. Jane Austen’s contemporaries would never have referred to former lovers as “exes,” for example. Persuasion is a misfire, but it’s often fun to watch.
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