Jane Austen’s calm, subtle novel gets the Fleabag treatment in this smirking romcom; it has more wrong notes than an inebriated squadron of harpists, including everything but a last-minute rush in a barouche to Bath airport. Our demure protagonist Anne Elliot is forever doing supercilious takes and wry monologues to camera, taking despairing swigs from a bottle of red wine in private, occasionally nursing a quirky pet rabbit, and at the end (unforgivably) gives us a wink to seal the deal of our adoringly complicit approval. The final wedding scene invents for us a cutesy comic twist involving two distinct characters whose status and purpose this film gets very wrong.
The casting in itself isn’t the problem: Dakota Johnson looks and sounds the part of Anne, who eight years before has been persuaded to turn down a marriage proposal from the handsome but penniless sailor Wentworth, in which role Cosmo Jarvis does an honest job, with a touch of Firth/Grant in his shy-yet-grumpy reticence. Now Wentworth has returned to the neighbourhood, newly wealthy, prestigiously promoted and reportedly still in search of a wife, to lonely Anne’s mortification (she is still in love with him). Meanwhile, her family has fallen on hard times due to spendthrift snob father Sir Walter Elliot, amusingly impersonated by Richard E Grant. Her selfish sister Mary (scene-stealingly played by Mia McKenna-Bruce) makes claims on Anne which take her away to Lyme, where the pretty sisters of her brother-in-law Charles (Ben Bailey-Smith) involve Wentworth in diversionary romantic attractions. Her cousin William Elliot (Henry Golding), a smug claimant to her father’s baronetcy, makes advances to her, and she is still close to the mentor who disastrously persuaded her against Captain Wentworth: this is Lady Russell (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who in this version is someone who makes cougar sex-tourist tours of Europe (off camera).
Jane Austen books shouldn’t be holy writ for adaptations: the Clueless movie and Curtis Sittenfeld’s underrated comic novel Eligible show how you can take a free hand. And this film’s Bridgerton-style diverse casting arguably engages with the novel’s historical themes of imperial entitlement, properties in the West Indies, naval plunder and privateering. But there is something smug and misconceived and unpersuasive about it.
• Persuasion is released on 8 July in cinemas, and on 15 July on Netflix.
