TMS Movie Review: Persuasion

(MRC / Netflix)

It’s some kind of irony Dakota Johnson ended up with the successful career both her grandmother, Tippi Hedren, and mother, Melanie Griffith, were predicted to have. Yes, Hedren is a legendary fashion model who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds (1963), and Griffith did manage to gain a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Mike Nichols’ Working Girl (1988). But neither of them had the consistency with both film quality and critics’ approval that Johnson currently has. Even the younger actress’ father, 1980s TV star Don Johnson, got his superstardom from his charm and good looks. I’m a fan of Dakota, which is why it pains me a little to unfortunately say that she is woefully miscast and possibly the worst part of Carrie Cracknell’s new screen interpretation of Jane Austen’s 1818 novel Persuasion.

I’m not a huge Austen fanatic, and am generally mostly familiar with her two most famous stories, Pride & Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815). But viewing Cracknell’s Persuasion gave me a lot of Cinderella vibes set in Austenland. Anne Elliot (Johnson) is the one low maintenance, carefree member of her family, including her vain father Walter (Richard E. Grant) and equally conceited sisters Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and Elizabeth (Yolanda Kettle). When her father is suddenly audited and close to eviction, Anne is also reunited with her former fiancé, Cpt. Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis). After years of secretly never moving on from him and originally being falsely persuaded to not marry the captain, Anne is now given a second opportunity to prove to Frederick they should be together.

A woman pushing 30 spending eight years crying and pining over a former flame? How sad. How tragic. Why would anyone want to watch that? Well, to be fair, we already do have quite a few popular stories with this exact theme. Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods initially only applies to Harvard to win back her ex-boyfriend in Robert Luketic’s Legally Blonde (2001). Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara spends nearly all of Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939) longing for Leslie Howard’s unavailable Ashley Wilkes. Keri Russell’s title character of the WB’s “Felicity” (1998-2002) moves and follows her crush all the way to NYC. But the thing is, I’d rather watch any of these screen projects over Netflix’s new Persuasion. And the two biggest weaknesses are Johnson’s casting and the direction.

(MRC / Netflix)

As if it wasn’t already pretty obvious Dakota Johnson was born and raised in Hollywood, her roots stick out like a sore thumb during her performance as Anne Elliot. Some actors just don’t naturally fit in an elaborate, romantic English costume/period piece, and it looks like Johnson is one of them. On top of this, it seems like Cracknell and screenwriters Ronald Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow might not be big fans of Austen. A lot of the time it feels like they just wanted to make their own version of P&P or Emma, but were stuck with Persuasion instead. This Anne has the sassiness of Emma Woodhouse, but none of the charisma. Instead she comes across a little too flippant and mean. It’s probably not a good thing I’m occasionally feeling sorry for her obnoxious family members as much as herself.

We’ve gotten a trend of ‘quirky’ 4th-wall breaking since the success of BBC’s “Fleabag” (2016-19), which used the visual narration effectively. But like film critic Mark Kermode mentions in his own review for Persuasion, the trope’s popularity might have actually worked against later movies and series. This film has some of the most annoying 4th-wall breaking I’ve seen on screen. Woody Allen’s narration in Annie Hall (1977) or Matthew Broderick’s in John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) look subtle in comparison. Johnson’s Anne cheekily glances at the camera in nearly every scene and wastes time giving us expository, witty repartee while sounding like she couldn’t care less.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m not even an Austen fan, so I have no idea what exactly they changed for the latest version of Persuasion to get so much heat from the author’s fanbase. But I do know as a fan of filmmaking, I don’t need to hear words like “playlist,” “empath” and “flex,” and rating people’s looks from 1-10 in a movie set in the early 1800s. Carrie Cracknell is not exactly Sofia Coppola or even Baz Luhrmann, based on her work here. If I were Dakota Johnson, I might want to consider sticking to contemporary set feel-good movies like Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) and Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022) in the future.