It's difficult to exaggerate how awful Persuasion on Netflix is and how many different ways it's horrible.
Persuasion is a poor knockoff of Netflix's popular Bridgerton. The candy-coated Regency imitation Bridgerton made popularly is what this film tries for, but it's too stolidly sure of its own merits to enjoy the business that makes Bridgerton so enjoyable. It mimics Bridgerton's sly anachronisms ("A 5 in London is a 10 in Bath!") as though the audience should take them as insights rather than cringe-inducing gags that have become overused.
It's disappointing as a showcase for Dakota Johnson. Before this film, Johnson's easygoing demeanor on screen had saved many other terrible films, but in the lead part of Anne Elliot, she does little to brighten Persuasion as it swings on its emotional pendulum from somber to bland. Instead, she gives the camera a wink and grinned as if to say, "Aren't we all in agreement that this is charming?" We're not.
It's a failure as a Persuasion adaption by Jane Austen. This movie is wide in its comedy, superficial in its emotions, and ham-fisted in its portrayal, in contrast to Jane Austen's original, which is devastating in its restraint. Unforgivably, it ruins one of Austen's most romantic scenes by undermining the famous letter-writing sequence to the point that it loses all sense of logic and, thus, all emotional impact.
Persuasion is just a lousy movie when viewed in isolation. It is dull. It lacks romance. It is not amusing. Not sad at all. It appears to have no purpose, and the justification it eventually provides is, to put it mildly, disrespectful to everyone concerned.
The narrative of Carrie Cracknell's film Persuasion, with a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, is quite similar to that of Jane Austen's original. The wealthy, attractive, and beautiful Anne Elliot once fell hopelessly in love with the young sailor Frederick Wentworth. They had made plans to wed. However, Anne's friends and family persuaded her that she should not waste her youth on a man with little money and even fewer prospects, and as a result, she shattered Wentworth's heart.
It had been eight years by the time the book and movie opened. Even though Anne never got over Wentworth, she is now a spinster and has decided to devote the rest of her life to taking care of her sisters and their children. Wentworth has advanced to the rank of captain in the navy. He's now well-off and respected, looking for his own wife, and still enraged with Anne for how she ended their relationship. And while Anne is also staying there, events have come together to make him a visitor at her sister's house.
The method Anne does in most situations, according to Austen, is to seem as cool and collected as possible while internally tormenting herself. One of the things that propel Austen's Persuasion ahead and make it so painful to read is the conflict between the social constraints Anne is required to deal with and her severe personal agony.
It is undoubtedly challenging to depict this kind of internal conflict on TV. Cracknell and her team's solution, which they completely eliminated, is undoubtedly a new one.
In the Netflix original film Persuasion, Anne adopts the habits of the lead character in a mid-tier rom-com from the 1990s, crying in the bathtub, downing enormous amounts of red wine, and pratfalling into accidentally spilling gravy over her head while crying. She either mugs to the camera about her family's faults or blurts out non-sequiturs in awkward social settings when she isn't sobbing. She reveals to one party, "There are moments when I dream that an octopus is eating my face.
While this is happening, Wentworth has lost his book counterpart's polished charm and competitive spirit. Wentworth, as portrayed by Cosmo Jarvis, is reticent, melancholy, and hazy; a Darcy cyborg without the specifics. He has a wonderful glance, but there is nothing to show what is behind it.
When Henry Golding shows in as Mr. Elliot, Anne's cousin and Wentworth's rival for her affection, the movie temporarily takes up. In full mustache-twirling villain mood, Golding (although unaccountably, Cracknell has omitted the plot line in which Mr. Elliot is actually revealed to be a villain). His presence gives the proceedings a much-needed boost of vitality.
The picture appears to be completely unconscious of the fact that energy is often weak in this. The apparent premise behind Persuasion is that all of its modern anachronisms will bring stodgy old Austen to life. Where Austen wrote, "Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, because they could never get acquainted," she did so with her highly honed sense of irony and social absurdity. The statement is rendered by Cracknell as awkwardly awkward, "Now we're strangers. It was a constant alienation. No, strangers are the worst. We've split up. Then the camera pulls back to let you see the outcome as if this movie has done you a favor by making Persuasion make sense in the twenty-first century, just like Clueless did for Emma in the twentieth.
Persuasion by Jane Austen, however, actually makes sense in the modern day. (Emma, too, for that matter; Clueless was well aware of this.) The societal norms that drove Anne Elliot to try to hide her own sadness have undoubtedly altered. However, the fundamental feelings of the book—loneliness, yearning, and despair—breathe fiercely into the present.
Clueless' successful adaptation of Emma was made possible by its witty and playful translation of Regency mores into a 1990s SoCal high school. Emma wasn't being explained in Clueless to an ignorant audience. With its audience, it was amusing itself.
The attempt made by Persuasion to impose contemporary mores on Regency England comes out as awkward and patronizing. It appears that the film believes you are too dim to comprehend Jane Austen's writing on your own, so rather than attempting to bring her work to life, it has chosen to spoon-feed you a synopsis.
I am half anguish, half hope, Wentworth tells Anne in an unforgettable passage from Persuasion by Jane Austen. Persuasion on Netflix is pure torture.
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