Because if it hadn’t been for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, this new version of Persuasion would never have been made. Of all the adaptations Jane Austen’s novel has undergone, this is by far the most flamboyantly Fleabaggy. It’s not just that Dakota Johnson’s Anne Elliott talks to the camera or even that she seems pathologically inclined to stare at us whenever anything happens. No, it’s that he does all of this while drinking wine from the bottle, crying in the bathroom, and cuddling a small pet. It is, hand on heart, a pencil haircut away from straying into copyright infringement territory. The reviews of Persuasion were awful. One called the film an all-time disaster, while another suggested the violent imprisonment of anyone involved in its production. And while many of the reviews (especially the British ones) have an element of territorial resentment about them, they also contain a lot of truth. It’s the kind of inelegant modernization that allows a character to describe himself as an empath, and his comedic ambition peaks during a scene where Johnson says with a sigh, “There’s nothing worse than thinking your life is ruined and then realize you have a long way to fall,” before promptly literally falling flat on his face. Honestly, imagine being Phoebe Waller-Bridge right now. You’ve spent years of your life painstakingly crafting one of the best, most accurate comedies of all time, and now you’re forced to watch all your hard-nosed sensibilities bleed untapped into such madness. The closest equivalent I can think of is J Robert Oppenheimer, whose impressive work in the field of fast neutron computation led directly to the creation of the atomic bomb. As Oppenheimer watched the first nuclear explosion in July 1945, the terrifying explosion that dominated the New Mexico skyline before his eyes reminded him of a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I have become Death, destroyer of worlds.” If Phoebe Waller-Bridge ever has the misfortune of watching Persuasion, she should probably go and get this quote tattooed on her leg. Of course, that’s how comedy works. A bold new voice enters the arena, and then everyone in the world rips it for years and years after. Look at the deluge of irony that entered the culture after David Letterman first went on the air, or the way everyone started slipping little Gervaisy’s sarcastic yeses into every sentence in the years after The Office launched. This is natural, but if you’ve ever been around a gang of bores who are still doing 50-year-old Monty Python to each other, you’ll know that it gets old fast. The press isn’t much help either, really. Once Fleabag reached full cultural capacity, any new show that happened to have a woman on it was called “The new Fleabag.” Back to Life, Run, Mood, I May Destroy You, This Way Up, The Duchess, Everything I Know About Love, Out of Her Mind – all these shows (and many more, including the French remake Mouche) have been tagged with the same lazy label. There have been so many new Fleabags in recent years that we’re all now in danger of forgetting what we liked about the old Fleabag. And yet, there’s something so aggressively obnoxious about the way Persuasion drops from Fleabag that it feels like the death of something. It feels like the Persuasion creative team made this movie specifically to poison the land where Fleabag once stood. If so, they were totally successful. I finished watching Persuasion 25 minutes ago, and if I ever see another character snickering at the camera, I’m going to lose my mind. More than that: I don’t want anyone looking at me, in real life, with their eyes, in case it triggers some sort of Dakota Johnson PTSD episode. Listen, Fleabag is great. It remains a near-perfect piece of television. But maybe it’s time to move it away from everything else now, before it takes away all the fun.
