Johnson, to be sure, projects a subtle intelligence and gravity more than worthy of this beloved literary character and her unusually bittersweet, ruminative love story.

The director and writers of Netflix’s ‘Persuasion’ explain the updated language, inclusive casting choices and why Dakota Johnson talks to the camera. Movies Why the creators of ‘Persuasion’ put a contemporary spin on Jane Austen’s classic But she would have to be playing someone other than Anne Elliot, the oldest, wisest and scarcely most accident-prone of Austen heroines. To be more charitable still: A movie in which Johnson falls on her face, upends a gravy boat over her head and climbs the stairs grumpily nursing a bottle of wine might be a source of some theoretical amusement. No movie that finds Dakota Johnson modeling high-waisted frocks against the Lyme Regis seawall or the lush Somersetshire countryside could be called a complete waste of time. Like even the lousiest Regency-era frippery, it has its intermittent pleasures, most of them visual. Plus, she’s making moves behind the camera: In 2019, Dakota co-founded a production company, TeaTime Pictures, with Ro Donnelly.To clarify the obvious - something the movie under review today has no problem doing - the “A” excerpts are from Jane Austen’s magnificent novel “Persuasion.” The “B” excerpts are from the movie, which I suppose you could also call “Persuasion,” insofar as it appears to have lifted sentences from the novel and fed them through some kind of Instagram-filtering, catchphrase-generating, text-summarizing idiot bot. She’s played an eager ingenue thrown into the New York City dating pool ( How To Be Single) a dancer training at an academy run by witches ( Suspiria) and recently, an overwhelmed mother vacationing in Greece in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter.

Catapulted into superstardom after being cast as Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, the actor has since starred in more than 25 films. Johnson has been stealing scenes since her short but memorable appearance in David Fincher’s The Social Network in 2010. When we first meet her, she’s living with her father and older sister, having turned down her big chance at love and happiness almost a decade earlier. Sarcastic and witty, 27-year-old Anne is the sometimes flawed narrator who takes the audience through the colorful cast of characters that populate her world.

Persuasion dakota