Emma for our times
Your first instinct while watching Emma may be to lick the screen (or perhaps blanch). This latest adaptation of Jane Austen has been candied up with the sort of palette you see in certain old-fashioned confectionaries and in fussy Georgian-era restorations. With a rosy blush in her cheeks, her satiny ribbons and bows, Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) herself looks as lovingly adorned and tempting as a Christmas delectable, though whether she bears any relation to Austen’s Emma is another matter.
Each generation gets the Emma it presumably wants or deserves. In the mid-1990s, there were several, most notably Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s 1995 contemporary take with a, like, totally cute miniskirted Alicia Silverstone, and Douglas McGrath’s squarer, rather more well-behaved Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow. A half-dozen or so Austen adaptations, both for film and for television, were released in the mid-1990s, causing McGrath to note that “first there is no Jane Austen and then it’s raining Jane Austen”. The downpour has continued since, though sometimes eased into a drizzle.
The new Emma, directed by Autumn de Wilde, making a confident feature debut, is set in an early 19th century that has been shrewdly retrofitted for modern-age sensibilities. (The novel was published in 1815.) All the familiar elements are here: the rolling hills and empire waistlines, the elegant manors and manners, the silent and attentive servants. Yet everything — the pea greens and dusky pinks, the comic looks and misunderstandings — has been emphatically embellished, so much so that it initially seems that de Wilde has adapted the material using Wes Anderson software.
This approach takes getting used to and your mileage may vary; much depends on your tolerance for archness, twee and lightly deployed Anderson-ish tics. Certainly the opening scenes are less than promising, what with their fussy symmetry, popping colours and absence of shadows as well as flashes of unappealing, poorly processed visuals. Yet when Emma begins swanning around some blooms while imperiously instructing a maid about which flower to cut, the scene economically summons up a world and an attitude of careless, unconscious privilege. Taylor-Joy affects an appropriate hauteur, though one that, alas, too often solidifies into masklike blankness.
This is a somewhat harsh, unappealing introduction to the character, whom Austen describes as “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition”. At 21, Emma lives with her father (Bill Nighy, reliably amusing) in a large country estate 16 miles from London. As in the novel, the movie opens just as her longtime companion, Miss Taylor (the invaluable Gemma Whelan), marries, leaving Emma alone and prey to her worst, most meddlesome habits, particularly when it comes to other people. She’s blissfully unaware of her
Emma
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Mia Goth Directed by Autumn de Wilde
failings, accustomed to having her way with, Austen writes, “a disposition to think a little too well of herself”.
Written by novelist Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries), this Emma follows Austen’s story in its sweep and to that end involves its heroine’s dogged, often humorously ill-conceived efforts to make a match for her poor friend, Harriet (the affecting Mia Goth). Harriet lives in a school whose red-coated denizens can be seen trudging around as meticulously arranged as the girls in the children’s book Madeline (or the titular servants in The Handmaid’s Tale). In Harriet, Emma sees a self-flattering project, someone whose life she can improve with better society and the right suitor. In this material, de Wilde clearly sees an opportunity for heightened expressionism.
The story’s comedy — and its narrative boldness — comes from the often absurd, yawning chasm between what Emma thinks she knows (and she believes she knows all) and what she so profoundly doesn’t understand, including the hearts of the people in her orbit. These include a dull clergyman (Josh O’Connor) and an enigmatic interloper (Callum Turner), both of whom Emma tries to steer toward Harriet. And then there’s the dashing heart-throb, Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn, very good), a wealthy friend of the family who, soon after galloping into the story, has stripped down naked in his bedroom, an entrance that immediately tips the role he plays in this game.
As Emma’s plans stutter forward and amusingly slip off course, the filmmakers’ mild interventions feel less forced, more organic; even a seductive dance and an importunate nosebleed end up working nicely. Austen’s story and words, it turns out, prove unsurprisingly durable and impervious to decorative tweaking. And so, after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive. Much of this has to do with the pleasure of watching people fall on their faces — and in love — and with the suppleness of the largely note-perfect cast. Together, they deepen the feelings that swirl around a woman who with a sharp tongue and a vast imagination invents her world amusingly, foolishly, enduringly.