Persuasion, Netflix
This has been a bad week for people called Johnson. First, the Prime Minister was ousted, now the lovely Dakota Johnson (almost certainly no relation), having sprung to fame as masochistic Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades trilogy, subjects us to an altogether different form of torture in a truly dreadful Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s wonderful novel Persuasion.
It’s hard to know where to start in con-veying just how misbegotten, to use a suitably 18th century word, this film is.
I watched it with my wife, who happens to also be a novelist called Jane, and, more to the point, re-reads all of Austen’s books every five years or so.
She was looking forward to it enormously. After all, Persuasion has been relatively overlooked by filmmakers.
Persuasion. (L to R) Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Frederick Wentworth
So, unless you’re of the view that Austen generally has been adapted to death and needs no more new…
