You have to feel a little sorry for this spirited adaptation of Jane Austen’s most intricate novel. It feels as if, even before the poor thing arrived on screens, it had been escorted to the rear of the cowshed and shot through its frontal lobe. The trailer trod an awkward line between Sunday-evening telly and something considerably more arch. The ladies are wearing empire line dresses and travelling in carriages. But they are also speaking in a language rarely heard in Bath during the Regency years. “Now, we’re worse than exes. We’re friends,” Dakota Johnson, an unlikely Anne Elliot, says to the unresponsive air. Cries of “sacrilege” clogged up the ether.
Yet this is far from the first time Austen has been hipped up. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless transferred Emma to Southern California. Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice took the similarly titled novel to India. The recent Disney+ Fire Island was another variation on Pride and Prejudice.
The current filmmakers’ error may have been to confuse matters by leaving us in the early 19th century. One could argue that Johnson is miscast as the Anne Elliot of Austen’s novel, but she is ideally cast as the more sardonic, less corseted character she plays in Carrie Cracknell’s perfectly adequate film. She speaks in a dry middle-class English voice that, though free of upspeaking (the very thought!), would not sound out of place in the Glastonbury glamping enclosure.
“Looking at the camera” being the signature storytelling technique for latish millennials, she peppers the action with winks at those of us beyond the fourth wall. One may groan at some of the gags in Ronald Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow’s screenplay, but it would be wrong to describe such conscious variations as “anachronism” (any more than it would be to discuss the racially neutral casting in those terms). The knowing gags do a decent job of connecting us with contemporary mores. Be fair. The already notorious reference to “a playlist” – here a bound wad of sheet music – is positively inviting some eye-rolling among the indulgent titters.
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Most of Austen’s plot remains. We begin with Anne telling us how badly she is coping with her broken engagement to the now vanished Captain Wentworth. She is knocking back wine by the bottle. She is weeping spontaneously. Have you got it yet? The script is briefly nodding towards a character from the 1990s – played later by one Renée Zellweger – who was herself adapted from a Jane Austen novel. Anyway, misery gets transmuted into discomfort when Wentworth returns in the implausibly tasty form of Cosmo Jarvis.
Some actors fare better than others as the film goes on to season the period drama with contemporary flavours. Even those driven to fury by the temporal distortions, will savour Richard E Grant as Anne’s pompous, vain father. Mia McKenna-Bruce has fun making what unkind reactionaries may call a “snowflake” of her sister Mary Elliott. “I am an empath,” she says with a very modern lack of self-awareness. Johnson and Jarvis are so breathtakingly stellar – remember when movie stars mattered? – that their relationship manages to engage even above all the conscious frivolity.
For all those successes, there is ultimately something a little dull about this Netflix release. One senses the mutated story bursting to free itself from the remaining chains and properly explode its source material.
The problem is not that it has moved too far from Austen, but that it has not moved far enough. The film will never compete with the excellent old-school BBC adaptation from 1995 with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds. Nor will it stand comparison with wilder Austen variations such as Clueless. Cracknell’s romp is, despite what the purists say, a perfectly pleasant variation of a text that could endure worse, but it feels stranded between two competing approaches.
An honourable effort for all the bellyaching.
