It is a truth universally acknowledged that Dakota Johnson has resting iPhone face, but that’s only the beginning of her problems in Persuasion.
The new Netflix film is a condescending, unsubtle, emotionally constipated take on Jane Austen’s classic novel—a misuse of not only its source material but also its star. But it’s also emblematic of perhaps the one hurdle standing in Johnson’s way in a post-“Actually, that’s not true, Ellen,” world: Casting directors just can’t seem to resist recruiting her for films in which she does not belong.
Johnson first became a household name in 2015 with the Fifty Shades of Grey film trilogy, in which her idiosyncratic charisma and sly humor transformed what could have been a disastrous flop into deliciously campy smut. But ever since then, the onetime Anastasia Steele’s skill for arch, quiet comedy has been wasted on roles that seem tailor-made for someone (anyone!) else.
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In retrospect, the projects Johnson released after the first Fifty Shades were a snapshot of what lay ahead. There was the February 2016 fling How to Be Single, in which Johnson co-starred as Rebel Wilson’s dowdy acolyte, and later that year, Luca Guadagnino’s sun-drenched (yet surprisingly dark) hang-out piece A Bigger Splash. While the former film forced Johnson into strained earnestness, the latter allowed her to embrace the shifty qualities that can make her such a fascinating performer.
In A Bigger Splash, Johnson plays the daughter Ralph Fiennes never knew he had. She’s piercing and intense, insulting half the table at lunch one moment and making inappropriate passes at guests minutes later. Most importantly, Johnson’s portrayal is utterly naturalistic, an actual meeting between performer and character. How to Be Single, like so many misguided projects to come, felt at every turn like it was working against her.
One could argue that Johnson lacks range as an actress, and that a sincere romantic escape like Persuasion was never within her grasp. Honestly, that last part might be true—but to believe the first, one would have to ignore a good chunk of her filmography.
In last year’s The Lost Daughter, Johnson plays Nina—an enigmatic, harried young mother who becomes the object of Olivia Colman’s obsession—with a frenetic exhaustion that practically pours from her eyes. In Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake, her magnetism becomes visceral as she uses her entire body to build a sense of foreboding around a ballet studio eventually accused of witchcraft. And her delicate Cha Cha Real Smooth performance as a young mother to an autistic daughter imbued an overly simple film with at least a degree of emotional complication.
Things seem to fall apart fastest, however, when you put Johnson in a lackluster romance. From How to Be Single’s painful attempt to recapture the magic of Sex and the City in a pre-And Just Like That era, to this year’s warm-hearted rom-com Am I OK?, one can easily spot Johnson’s struggle to appear natural—a plight perhaps best captured, actually, in Persuasion.
It’s not just her less-than-persuasive British accent (sorry), or the constant Fleabag-esque “covert” glances to camera, or the fact that Johnson’s face really does look like one that’s just snapped a selfie. (It is this writer’s personal theory that given her energy, Johnson could plausibly appear in films stretching back to roughly the late ’60s, but no earlier, for some unknown but certainly very good reason.) It’s that on every level, from the vocal to the facial to the spiritual, Johnson feels out of place—a reality that someone, anyone casting this project should have clocked.
Alas, no one did. So now, we have a version of Persuasion in which every shot of its lovestruck protagonist, Anne Elliot, somehow resembles that Architectural Digest home tour in which Johnson infamously (fantastically, and for some unknown reason) lied about loving limes. We as a society could certainly do worse (and we have), but shouldn’t we all be striving for more?
