Persuasion, a new Netflix movie, has two problems. The first is the inevitable comparison to Roger Michell’s wonderful adaptation of the novel in 1995. On that occasion, the best of the novel shone through and made the film a cult classic. The other is the plethora of English Regency-based dramas populating television. But especially, the enormous influence of The Bridgertons in period dramas from the last five years onwards. Director Carrie Cracknell tries to emulate the Shonda Rhimes show’s exercise in brilliant wit, but she doesn’t quite pull it off. Not just because Jane Austen’s novel doesn’t need reconstruction or a historical alternate universe to work. If not because the original story is already a brilliant statement on prejudice, exclusion and the search for happiness.
But Persuasion it fails to clutter Austen’s speech — universally recognized for its irony and twisted satire — with passive, aggressive, and tedious social commentary. Especially when the puns, the elaborate atmosphere, and the powerful status of the novel as an insight into complex ideas, it disappears. Instead of her, Cracknell is much more interested in making it clear that Austen was a woman ahead of her time, something that the argument does not need.
Persuasion
Persuasion’, by Carrie Cracknell for Netflix, is the umpteenth adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jane Austen. Instead, the script’s futile attempt to overload the novel’s social and cultural commentary hampers its premise. And worse yet, it turns the brilliant source material into a grueling cheesy melodrama without much of an incentive. In the end, this movie is a sugar-coated look at love and the big disappointment of the platform.
The premise of the woman who must marry to avoid becoming a social outcast becomes an ineffective critique of contemporary culture. In particular, because the source material does not require a twist. Per se, Persuasion It is a drama with apparently simple airs, under which beats a deep secret pain. version of the Netflix movie strips the story of its charmits bittersweet tone and its definitive capacity to disconcert.
Persuasion is a bad copy of a larger product
The most confusing thing is that the Netflix adaptation has a tense atmosphere that seems not to have much to contribute to an already familiar story. The director moves the camera with a sour look through sumptuous salons and perfect dainty suits. But he lacks the cunning to make all beauty the surface of something more painful and tenacious.
Even the English Bath, birthplace of the writer and setting for the film’s exteriors, have a lackluster tone. A discolored mushy feeling that doesn’t quite heal even in its most emotional moments. For your first half hour, Persuasion made something clear: the idea you want to convey lacks weight. Or he loses it as the plot loses beauty, power, and eloquence.
Austen’s work that defines an era
Cracknell clearly wanted to tell the story using the effervescent energy of The Bridgerton. Persuasion has the same joyful atmosphere, the inclusion of racialized characters and the idea about time as an alternative idea. But the script lacks the charm of the ability to take Austen’s work to the same places as the popular series.
Instead, it settles for showing Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) as a woman who wants to live. She that she knows that she wants to live besides, but crushed under the social weight of singleness. Of course, these are common themes in Austen’s literature, but the writer always dealt with them in a symbolic way. Anne knows that her great advantage is to appear useful to her wealthier relatives. From being a woman she was persuaded to let herself be carried away by love.
Such a story runs the risk of seeming cheesy out of necessity. But Austen imbued her with a wry sense of humor that has underpinned every adaptation of her for years to come. Oddly enough, the Netflix version lacks that depth of origin, at a time when the rationale for having it is clear. Worse yet, he turns his characters into caricatures.
Persuasion, a confusing work
It is no longer about the vindication of women as an individual entity and the search for mental freedom. The way that Persuasion from Netflix clumsily plays with story elements, turns it into an absurd melodrama. Out of love snubbed by Anne he returns, but instead of that meaning rethinking it becomes a game of cat and mouse with no depth. Anne is in love with Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) whom she abandoned for being a simple sailor. But now that he is a wealthy Naval Captain, the eternal single’s interest becomes compelling.
But if in the novel the dilemma is moral and intellectual, in Persuasion it is a boring dispute. Especially when he tries to forcefully fit the novel into a contemporary dilemma that the story doesn’t need. And that, in addition, they have a strangely slowed down effect. Why insist again and again on the injustice of valuing a woman for her social status? Why return to the topic of love as the main source of enjoyment and hope, if the novel narrates it in a subtle layer? If something is tedious, and at times unbearable in Persuasion, It’s your inability for biting wit. Its crude simplicity and direct innocence.
And in the end, they all ate partridges because there was no other choice
Dakota Johnson could have been a memorable Austen woman. Especially since she has the sharp intuitive malice of all her heroines. But the script by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow fills the plot with ridiculous phrases. Intelligence statements that no one needs to hear because they are implicit and nods to current feminism without much depth. If the anachronisms in The Bridgertons or in superior works such as Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola were a point of brilliant provocation, in Persuasion They are pure waste. Blank spaces that the script doesn’t know how to hold, let alone craft carefully.
In the end, Persuasion It is a shadow of what could have been. A stiff, boring and soporific version of a work that stands out along with its opposite. A senseless waste of a drama with hundreds of edges and specifically, a portentous sense of identity. On the contrary, the Netflix movie is a soft background. A forgettable work that, in the end, will be just a fleeting memory in the memory of the huge catalog of the platform.