Cracknell beefs up the humour by having Johnson repeatedly make winking eye contact with the camera. But now, with fortunes reversed, they meet again. Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) was persuaded not to marry the then penniless Frederick Wentworth ( Cosmo Jarvis) seven years before. The gauzy melancholy of Austen’s story about lost loves reunited is mothballed in favour of a sassy romcom reading of the material. But this adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, by the theatre director Carrie Cracknell, from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, is a travesty. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women handled the balance elegantly and The Personal History of David Copperfield, in the hands of Armando Iannucci, matched irreverent humour with respect for Charles Dickens’s classic. T he sweet spot for period literary adaptations is to combine an instinct for the spirit of the original work with a distinctively modern sensibility.
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