Which is the best version of Emma?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Clueless, the 1996 high-school comedy starring Alicia Silverstone, is a stone-cold classic.
With its endlessly quotable script (you’ve heard someone say ‘‘as if’’), and costumes that have informed fashion for more than two decades (the plaid skirts, knee socks and oversized jackets that are on trend right now are a hat-tip to Clueless), it has aged remarkably well.
Clueless is also, I believe, the best film adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Emma of the past 25 years (and here I will humbly implore you to forgiveme the confused crossreferencing of my opening line; it was too good to pass up).
Austen’s fourth novel is a personal favourite. I always preferred its prickly, sharp-tongued eponymous heroine to haughty Elizabeth
Bennet of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility’s
dreary Elinor Dashwood.
Emma Woodhouse is as close as an Austen woman can feel to truly modern and, played right, Emma is more like a romantic comedy than a period piece, one that provides an easy point of entry for modern audiences. After all, the centrepiece of its story is two characters realising that their overt displays of acrimony are amask for their growing attraction to one another. That’s the script for pretty much any rom-com you’ve ever seen.
But first you have to overcome the challenge of getting a contemporary audience to connect with a 200-year-old story. Emma was very much a modern tale when it was published in 1815.
Like all of Austen’s novels, it was biting social satire, poking fun at and pointing out the flaws in the mores of the day, its sharp socio-economic divisions, the relationships between masters and servants and, of course, as this is Austen, the pressures on women to marry, and marry well.
Like most novels of its time, it is long, and plot-dense. My Penguin Classics edition is 474 pages and was originally published in three volumes.
A lot of characters with intricate familial and professional relationships to one another (Mr Knightley, Emma’s antagonist-turned-love-interest, is her sister’s husband’s brother, while Mr Churchill, her loveinterest-turned-antagonist, is her former governess’s stepson, et cetera) and the comedic plot has them move in and out of one another’s spheres in ways that can be exhausting.
The first of the trio of theatrical Emmaswas released one year before Clueless, in 1995.
It stars Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role, and has some great support cast, particularly Toni Collette as Emma’s unwitting protege, Harriet Smith, Sophie Thompson as the irritating if well-meaning Miss Bates, and a particularly superb Alan Cumming as the smarmy Mr Elton.
It’s not a bad film, but it falls into the trap of many period films in which the characters behave as if they’re in amuseum piece, as if they are not, as far as they should be concerned, the most thoroughly contemporary people that have ever lived.
The characters’ movements are stagey, the dialogue is overly mannered.
It’s faithful to the plot too, making the film clock in at more than two hours and delivering a couple more plot twists than is strictly necessary.
Also plot-faithful is the new film, in cinemas now, with
The Witch star Anya Taylor-joy as Emma.
This one is amuch livelier, fun adaptation and, yes, more modern. That is in large part down to the script, written by Kiwi Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton ( The Luminaries), which captures the caustic tone of the novel as well as its humour.
Director Autumn de Wilde dresses the film in bright tones and sharp lighting – it’s bright and fresh and relaxed – set to a soundtrack peppered with 60s-style folk music.
But it’s long, and despite de Wilde’s best efforts at buoyancy, it can be hard to keep emotional attachment to a plot that is so archaic.
This is what makes Clueless so great. Writer/director Amy Heckerling streamlines the
Emma story into something much more easily digestible.
She removes a number of characters and gets rid of those intricate relationships – although Cher’s relationship to the Mr Knightley character, Paul Rudd’s Josh, is a little ickier; here, he’s her former stepbrother, even if Cher’s father was, in her words, ‘‘hardly even married to his mother’’.
She also condenses the plot down to a zippy 97 minutes, nearly half an hour shorter than either of the straight adaptations.
Clueless goes to the heart of
Emma; it’s the story of a young woman who realises her matchmaking is actually selfish meddling, and that the right man for her has been under her nose all along.
A faithful adaptation isn’t always the best.