7/2/2023 0 Comments Persuasion dakota![]() ![]() Jane Austen books shouldn’t be holy writ for adaptations: the Clueless movie and Curtis Sittenfeld’s underrated comic novel Eligible show how you can take a free hand. Her cousin William Elliot (Henry Golding), a smug claimant to her father’s baronetcy, makes advances to her, and she is still close to the mentor who disastrously persuaded her against Captain Wentworth: this is Lady Russell (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who in this version is someone who makes cougar sex-tourist tours of Europe (off camera). Her selfish sister Mary (scene-stealingly played by Mia McKenna-Bruce) makes claims on Anne which take her away to Lyme, where the pretty sisters of her brother-in-law Charles (Ben Bailey-Smith) involve Wentworth in diversionary romantic attractions. Meanwhile, her family has fallen on hard times due to spendthrift snob father Sir Walter Elliot, amusingly impersonated by Richard E Grant. ![]() ![]() Now Wentworth has returned to the neighbourhood, newly wealthy, prestigiously promoted and reportedly still in search of a wife, to lonely Anne’s mortification (she is still in love with him). The casting in itself isn’t the problem: Dakota Johnson looks and sounds the part of Anne, who eight years before has been persuaded to turn down a marriage proposal from the handsome but penniless sailor Wentworth, in which role Cosmo Jarvis does an honest job, with a touch of Firth/Grant in his shy-yet-grumpy reticence. ![]()
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