In this movie’s case, maybe that would have been wise.
We could just as well leave Jane Austen out of it. The dramas, tensions, pleasures are all familiar. Their blueprints have already been remade a thousand times over anyway, much like the work of Shakespeare. But we keep doing it because the situations of those novels feel timeless - not least because we keep drawing from them. Modernizing them can feel like putting a hat on a hat. Austen’s heroines were already ahead of their time. From the start, Persuasion lays bare its conviction that this particular Austen heroine makes almost too much sense for our own moment, with our hyper-ironic personas and gratuitous fits of self-awareness. Model Montero: Lil Nas X Talks Bringing the 'Campness' as Latest YSL Beauty Ambassador “I almost got married once,” she says at the start of the movie, narrating a moment from her past, when she was lucky in love and spent her afternoons eating face with a swarthy seaman. In this modern take, she navigates her life with charmingly dry resignation, even pleasant boredom, talking us through the machinery of her days in a winking style that’s recognizable from tweets and Instagram captions. Anne Elliot, one of Austen’s most mature heroines, is only too aware of this. At the very least, everyone seems to make her fate their problem. An unmarried woman, in an Austen text, is a problem. She also breaks the fourth wall and chugs wine like an elder millennial in a Nancy Meyers dramedy. She’s proudly intelligent and generous, conflicted and allergic to male patronizing in the ways appropriate to Austen. It’s that kind of movie.Ĭlearly, the Anne Elliot of this new Persuasion isn’t the period-appropriate heroine of the movie’s BBC forebears. “There’s nothing worse than thinking your life is ruined, then realizing you’ve got much, much further to fall,” Anne says. The drama of that imminent humiliation is irresistible, and Persuasion is hardly the kind of movie to put up a fight. This would of course be when the two former lovers meet again. Persuasion is the story of what happens eight years later, when Wentworth has achieved the rank of captain and Anne’s family has gone broke thanks to her wastrel father’s financial indiscretions. Their union would have been imprudent by 19th-century English standards. The man who had her heart, a sailor named Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis), was of a lower class. Anne Elliot ( Dakota Johnson) had once been in love - and in the enviable position to do something about it. One of the most important things to happen in Persuasion, Carrie Cracknell’s new Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, has already gone down by the time the movie starts.