Netflix’s Persuasion Is Jane Austen for People Who Didn’t Do the Reading
When the first trailer for Netflix’s new adaptation of Persuasion dropped, many Jane Austen fans were naturally skeptical. Nervous even. Because while the clip boasted a charmingly colorful aesthetic and slick Fleabag-style narration, it was jarringly and distinctly at odds with the original novel’s tone. “Is someone at Netflix on drugs?” some Austen fans might have wondered at various points during the trailer. “Did they accidentally make Emma and put a Persuasion label on it?” some could wonder. Or “has anyone involved with this project ever actually read the book this is supposed to be based on?”
Now, having actually seen the full film, dear readers, it pains me to confirm for you that many of our initial concerns were not only valid—they probably did not go far enough. Because this Persuasion will likely be nigh-on unrecognizable to those who love the original novel, simply because it refuses to wrestle with the book’s most important themes of loss, regret and recovery. Instead, we get a story that feels like Jane Austen cosplay—and a movie that would be a lot better if it weren’t trying so hard to pretend it’s something it’s not.
It’s clear where the impetus for this adaptation came from. With its colorblind casting, modern slang and colorful aesthetics, it’s clearly attempting to do Austen in a more Bridgerton style, but the problem appears to be that in the rush to find another Regency romance to adapt, no one bothered to explore whether the movie they were making was the same story that the book it purports to be based on was telling.
Persuasion was Austen’s final completed novel, written when she was already in the grips of the illness that would ultimately take her life. It is, perhaps of necessity, a simpler, sadder and more straightforward story, and features a heroine who is quieter and more careworn than the Marianne Dashwoods and Elizabeth Bennets who came before her. The book’s Anne Elliott is 27 when the story begins, a spinster by any definition of her time, who feels she has lost out on her chance at a happily ever after by allowing her snotty family to convince her (a decade prior) that Frederick Wentworth, the man she loved, was beneath her station. She’s never gotten over her subsequent choice to break his heart—and her own in the process—by rejecting his proposal. She is a woman who, above all else, is deeply sad.
It is, of course, a sadness she’s learned to live with at this point in her life, but it’s a darkness that has undoubtedly colored the person she’s grown up to become. And when Wentworth reappears in her life, now a wealthy naval captain and highly eligible bachelor in his own right, she must wrestle with her regrets all over again. At its core, Persuasion is a story of second chances, a love letter to the brokenhearted still struggling to find their happy endings. It’s a deeply introspective, weirdly prickly novel that feels very unlike the author’s more overt comedies of manners. But that’s precisely what makes it great.
Anne is, in many ways, Austen’s most repressed heroine. She’s matured in and been worn down by the years since her heartbreak into someone who tells herself she feels nothing, when in truth she feels everything. Her story is deeply depressing and incredibly satisfying, as she comes to terms not just with her own feelings but with the fact she is allowed to have them and own them in the first place.