At the beginning of Netflix’s new adaptation of Persuasion, our heroine Anne Elliot, still in the flush of youth, embraces a handsome soldier in a field of wild grass overlooking the sea, while lush, romantic strings play in the background. Except, of course, Persuasion isn’t like other Jane Austen novels – and the acclaimed British theatre director Carrie Cracknell’s new riff on the story starts exactly where you might expect another Austen take to end. “I almost got married once,” says Dakota Johnson’s protagonist, Anne Elliot. “But he was a soldier without rank or fortune, and I was persuaded to give him up.”
Flash forward seven or eight years, and Anne is – by the standards of Regency Britain, anyway – already past her prime. In a Bridget Jones-esque montage, she cries in the bathtub, drinks wine straight from the bottle, and describes herself as “thriving.” An introduction to her preening, social-climbing family, the aristocratic Elliots, who have fallen on hard times thanks to the profligate spending of Anne’s father, Sir Walter (Richard E Grant), sees her deliver deadpan asides that break the fourth wall, poking fun at the flaws and foibles of those around her as she resolves to cut her own path through high society Bath.
“With period pieces, I’m always interested in there being a connection between then and now,” says Cracknell, whose playful take on Austen marks her directorial debut as a filmmaker; a regular at London’s National Theatre and Royal Court, her Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge-starring production of Sea Wall/A Life picked up four Tony nominations in 2020. “I think period films often teach you as much about the moment they were made in as they do the moment that they’re replicating, somehow.” It was this understanding that equally informed the unique approach of screenwriters Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow. After all, even the most obsessive fans of Jane Austen will admit that Persuasion – the last novel she wrote, and published six months after her death in 1817 – is something of an outlier within her beloved, endlessly adapted canon, thanks to the older age of her protagonist and its more wistful, reflective air.