Bonnets off to a gorgeous Emma for the MeToo era
Emma C ert: PG 2hrs4mins ★★★★★
Before it hits what eventually turns out to be its totally delicious stride, there are moments – more than a few of them – when this new production of Jane Austen’s Emma looks as if it’s simply going to be too much. All that verdant English countryside, all those young women bustling around in dresses that look like nighties, all those carriages busily rushing to and fro. Throw in Isobel Waller-Bridge and
David Schweitzer’s prettily jaunty music, Bill Nighy in a succession of frock coats, and it’s like walking into a Jane Austen theme park.
But slowly – and the stressed or slightly Austen-averse will need to give it a good 20 minutes – it settles down, helped by the enduring appeal of Austen’s much adapted plot (shallow, vain young woman mistakenly believes she has a gift for matchmaking but causes only mischief and misery) and by a handful of wonderful supporting performances.
Nighy, Johnny Flynn and particularly Mia Goth all need to take a bow, because it is thanks to their early efforts that we slowly come to realise how good Anya Taylor-Joy is as Austen’s unsympathetic heroine, the ‘handsome, clever and rich’ Emma Woodhouse.
Swapping her customary dark tresses for a veritable frenzy of blonde ringlets, the Florida-born but London-raised actress is a delight in a role that in the past quarter-century has been played by the classy likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Beckinsale and Romola Garai.
It can’t be easy playing someone that even Austen thought that ‘no one but myself will much like’ but Taylor-Joy, who to date has been something of a horror specialist, gets it pretty much spot-on. In early scenes we can see the character’s essential vacuity and deluded self-centredness as she takes full credit for the marriage between her former governess and the widowed local landowner Mr Weston.
But we can also see the underlying charm and spirit that have made Emma’s handsome neighbour, George Knightley (Flynn), an almost daily visitor to Hartfield, the fine country house she shares with her nervy, draught-sensitive (‘Can you feel a chill?’) but fabulously well-dressed father (Nighy). All she needs to do is a little growing up, and to discover that love is not the simple game she believes it is. But then she has lived only ‘nearly 21 years’.
While Nighy makes us laugh and the smouldering Flynn looks hugely dashing in riding boots and sideburns, it is Goth, who co-starred with Taylor-Joy and 1917 star George MacKay in The Secret Of Marrowbone, who gives this adaptation its beating heart. She is touchingly brilliant as the lowly-born Harriet Smith, totally enthralled by her prettier, cleverer, richer friend but dreaming of a true love of her own.
When a young local farmer proposes, she thinks she has. But Emma believes her friend can do better – maybe the vain local cleric Mr Elton (Josh O’Connor)? Only we’re pretty sure his romantic interests lie elsewhere. And so this almost Shakespearean comedy of mismatched romance and misunderstandings begins…
The film may be produced by Working Title and have all that company’s film-making expertise to call on, yet it is directed by an American, Autumn de Wilde, best known for her photography and music vid
‘Nighy makes us laugh and Flynn looks dashing in riding boots’
eos, and here making her feature-film debut. And a very a good job she makes of it, delivering a film that always looks gorgeous and drawing wonderful performances from a talented cast that soon also includes Miranda Hart as the garrulous but lonely busybody Miss Bates. Look out particularly for some wonderful dance scenes sizzling with erotic potential in a way that’s tempting to describe as definitely nonAusten-like but probably isn’t.
Novelist Eleanor Catton, who won the 2013 Man Booker prize with The
Luminaries, supplies a likeable and enjoyably amusing screenplay that remains reasonably faithful to the book but, rightly, makes the most of modern resonances about the position of women – and clever women, in particular – today.
In a film that features bottoms, a perfectly timed nosebleed and a very funny piano scene, the only slightly jarring note is hit by its conspicuous lack of ethnic diversity. The recent adaptation of David Copperfield by Armando Iannucci showed just how effective so-called ‘colour-blind’ casting can be, but here, by conspicuous contrast… well, let’s just say you can see it earning the unwanted hashtag #emmasowhite. Which is a shame because it’s #emmasogood too.