The sweet spot for period literary adaptations is to combine an instinct for the spirit of the original work with a distinctively modern sensibility. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women handled the balance elegantly; and The Personal History of David Copperfield, in the hands of Armando Iannucci, matched irreverent humour with respect for Charles Dickens’s classic. But this adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, by the theatre director Carrie Cracknell, from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, is a travesty.
The gauzy melancholy of Austen’s story about lost loves reunited is mothballed in favour of a sassy romcom reading of the material. Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) was persuaded not to marry the then penniless Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) seven years before. But now, with fortunes reversed, they meet again. Cracknell beefs up the humour by having Johnson repeatedly make winking eye contact with the camera. It’s such a tone-deaf device, demonstrating so little sensitivity to the delicate precision of Austen’s writing, that you wonder why she didn’t just go the whole hog and bung in some comedy trombone quacks and an audience laugh track.
Persuasion is on limited release in cinemas and on Netflix from 15 July
