Persuasion, review: erroneous Austen ‘update’ is woke-washing at its worst

Dakota Johnson can be a kind of sorceress – how else could she have redeemed Fifty Shades of Grey, of all films, from a writer hell-bent on rendering Anastasia Steele as a simpering dullard? The main problem with the iffy new Netflix Persuasion is trying to perform much the same intervention on an author who was minding her own business – poor, blameless Jane Austen.

Within seconds, purists will scream, or possibly cancel their subscriptions. This is certainly an Anne Elliot, as played with plentiful complaints to camera by Johnson, that we’ve never encountered before. I’d go so far as to say that Austen wouldn’t recognise a trace of her original creation in this downtrodden, quick-witted socialite speaking her mind – but Phoebe Waller-Bridge might.

Yep, this is Austen not just ruthlessly Netflixed but ingratiatingly Fleabagged. Almost every character is introduced by the tragically unmarried Anne, with her famously ghastly family, rolling her eyes to camera – “That’s my sister”, and so on. It’s one thing for Austen to declare that “vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character”, but to have the heroine explain this to us personally, while Richard E Grant fluffs up his sideburns as her father, is to embark on comprehensive tonal sabotage.

This is not playing charmingly fast and loose à la Clueless (1995), but doing dress-up-box Austen half by the book, cluelessly. It’s set in the early 19th century, not remotely of Austen, but of Bridgerton, the success of which has unfortunately convinced Netflix that anything goes. Imagine flaunting an antique copy of the novel in a full-cosplay selfie, but holding it upside down.

The film itches to be up-to-date, with colourblind casting that makes especially little sense for an author this obsessed with social barriers. Rethink race in Austen, by all means – don’t just ignore it. Nikki Amuka-Bird radiates charm as Anne’s godmother, Lady Russell, but the other parts on offer to the non-white cast are unmistakably the dreariest.

Meanwhile, the dialogue perpetrates five war crimes per minute. “He’s a ten, and I never trust a ten…” says Anne of her handsome, shallow cousin William (Henry Golding). Someone else is accused of “farting around”. When she eavesdrops on an intimate scene between the brooding naval captain Wentworth (a creditable Cosmo Jarvis, just about surviving his Mills & Boon styling) and the smitten Louisa (Nia Towle), Anne isn’t only hiding behind a tree but has pulled her knickers down to relieve herself. Proof that Austen’s protagonists were capable of weeing, not just weeping? An embarrassing moment all round.

After a string of stellar stage productions, including the Young Vic’s ingenious A Doll’s House (2012) and the NT’s crackerjack Medea (2014) with Helen McCrory, director Carrie Cracknell has been lured into trashy frivolity here, in much the same way Ben Wheatley was on his Rebecca remake.

With all the other talent on show, couldn’t Netflix afford better scripts? This one, credited to Oscar-winner Ronald Bass (Rain Man) and Alice Victoria Winslow, is so complacent there’s no getting around it: Austen’s delicate plot becomes a dull trudge, and Anne’s fourth-wall-breaking simply makes the roof cave in.

Johnson will bounce back. She’s too alert an actress to fluff what she’s been given here completely – it’s more a case of acquitting herself fine in the wrong assignment. She and Jarvis strike a few honest sparks. It might be possible to cruise through it oblivious to what Austen is suffering – to treat Cracknell’s film on the most basic level as generically attractive costume drama, with photogenic people pining for each other on the Dorset coast.

That’s certainly a recipe for less annoyance. But when Louisa takes her tumble off the Cobb at Lyme Regis, all I could think of was the immeasurably superior 1995 version by Roger Michell, which shot that sequence metres away.

The way Michell finessed the most autumnal of Austen’s works, with Amanda Root cast to perfection, set a gold standard. This takes a flailing leap, but it’s neither audacious enough to commit to a singular vision, nor shrewd enough to get the novel right. It nosedives between two stools and never gets up.

PG cert; on Netflix now