The latest Jane Austen adaptation is dreadful
Full marks to whoever tweeted, after watching the trailer for the dire new version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, that, "I’m sorry but Dakota Johnson has the face of someone who knows what an iPhone is." In that pithy phrase, the failings of Carrie Cracknell’s film are laid bare immediately. Johnson, despite the utter dreadfulness of the Fifty Shades films that launched her to fame, is a talented and likable actress, but she is also contemporary in a way that many of her peers are. You can dress her in all the crinolines and bonnets and Regency finery in the world, but she still looks like a California resident from 2022 cosplaying, rather than an inhabitant of early nineteenth-century Britain. But Johnson is not the only problem with Persuasion.
