“I hope we draw in new, younger audiences who perhaps know very little about Jane Austen,” the director Carrie Cracknell told the Los Angeles Times. “And that a whole new generation will watch the adaptation and then be drawn to read and fall in love with the book.” The unsaid implication of this is that young audiences—presumably mostly young women—would be uninterested or unable to comprehend more faithful period dialogue. This presupposition is more than evident in the final product.
The movie doesn’t seem to trust its audience to understand even the most basic facts of early-19th-century life, so it explains, via ham-fisted lines of dialogue, that women in this era didn’t have means of making their own money outside of marriage. It also doesn't attempt to explore the varying shades of rank and mobility within Regency-era upper-class society that was at the heart of the original story. Why assume audiences won't understand the difference between titled nobility and an upwardly mobile gentry? We’ve all seen Downton Abbey.
But one of the movie's most emblematic (and memed) sins was translating Austen’s line “Now they were strangers. Nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted” to this: “Now we’re worse than exes. We’re friends.” Why? Why make this change? The updated line isn’t more understandable; it’s just nonsense. In an attempt to make Anne’s character relatable to modern audiences, the film basically sends her through a Bridget Jones blender from which she emerges with food on her face, pounding red wine, and blurting out embarrassing jokes. In the novel, the tension between Mr. Elliott and Captain Wentworth comes down to whether Anne is still persuaded to value her family’s rank over her own character and judgment. In the movie Elliott and Wentworth are two dueling hunks.
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As a cultural object, Jane Austen is a genre unto herself that many people feel emotionally close to but also protective of. Austen diehards are always stressing the importance of the author’s wit, feminism, and influence because, to non-Austen readers, there’s an impression of frivolity, melodrama, and general hyperfeminine unseriousness to her work—as reflected in something like Bridgerton or Sanditon. The reason the Persuasion on Netflix feels so insulting is that it plays directly into this stereotype by translating the text’s nuanced language into trite, 21st-century colloquialisms while smoothing class critiques into rom-com farce. Anne’s agency—her ability to trust her own mind and make her own decisions—is central to the novel. The movie’s Anne is dragged around until her decision is made for her after it is revealed that Wentworth loves her after all and Elliott doesn’t.
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