CHARMED BY AUSTEN’S POWERS
Do we really need another adaptation of Emma? Well take a peek under the bonnet, as this is a Valentine’s Day cracker
WHAT could be a bigger treat for Valentine’s Day than a new adaptation of a Jane Austen novel? In truth, you can probably think of quite a few contenders.
Do we really need another excursion back a couple of centuries, another immersion into Austen’s restrained world of pianoforte recitals and formal dances, where no man dares say quite how much he fancies the girl with the handsome embonpoint, and no (nice) woman ever throws herself at the dish in the shiny breeches?
Well, here’s a version of emma that surprisingly rewards the trip back in time, in which Anya Taylor- Joy excels as Austen’s least lovable heroine.
Within the past 25 years, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Beckinsale and Romola Garai have all played emma Woodhouse, a meddling matchmaker who, in her creator’s words on the novel’s very first page, is in danger of ‘having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself’.
Back in the mid-1990s, a time when the BBC might easily have stood for Bosoms, Bonnets and Carriages, a film called Clueless came out. It was the cinematic interpretation of emma that I still rate above all others, largely because it was counter-intuitively set in 20th- century Beverly hills. The meddler went by the name of Cher horowitz and was played by Alicia Silverstone. They don’t all need bonnets.
STILL, it’s nice to be reminded that there’s still a place for a back-to-basics approach. This emma is done with great vigour, wit and charm — so much so that I defy anyone to roll their eyes at all those social affectations in which Austen specialises, all those misunderstandings that flourish in the chasm between the sexes.
The director is Autumn de Wilde — not an obvious choice, even though hers is a name to light up any list of credits. She is an American music video veteran who has never made a fulllength feature film before.
But with the help of cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, a fellow American, and screenwriter eleanor Catton, a New Zealander, she evokes Regency england beautifully. This is a truly sumptuous-looking film (whether the sumptuousness includes one entirely gratuitous shot of Johnny Flynn in the altogether, you’ll have to decide for yourself).
Incidentally, this year’s Bafta awards introduced a prize for casting — overdue recognition for a vital skill in the film-making process. And toppers doffed here, because in all but a couple of cases the casting couldn’t be more perfect.
Taylor- Joy will just have to forgive me for observing that she lacks the distracting modernday beauty of some of those other screen emmas. She looks exactly as if she might have stepped out of a long-ago century; one of the many reasons she was so compelling in her 2015 leading role debut The Witch. She looks, moreover, as if she might be a bit of a handful, which emma certainly is at the start of the story.
Similarly, Bill Nighy unleashes all his fluttery mannerisms with fey abandon as a very funny Mr Woodhouse, emma’s precious father, endlessly worried about catching a chill. Flynn, too, is just right as emma’s old friend and verbal sparring partner George Knightley (though Austen will be looking down through her delicate fingers, or more likely calling for the celestial smelling salts, during the scene in which he is being dressed by his valet, and fleetingly flashes a sturdy derriere).
Clothed or unclothed, Flynn suits period dramas. he was excellent in ITV’s Vanity Fair a couple of years ago. Maybe it’s those lavish sideburns he wears so well. They place him either at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, or in about 1974, behind the wheel of a Ford Capri.
On the whole, the narrative cleaves to the novel.
The incorrigible emma can’t stop herself from trying to manipulate the romantic destinies of her friends, notably that of her guileless companion, the lowborn harriet Smith (Mia Goth), who has caught the eye of a wholesome tenant farmer. But emma decides to fix her up with the oleaginous vicar, Mr elton (Josh O’Connor), instead.
Naturally, this being Jane Austen, he has set his sights on someone else, someone higher up the social ladder.
BUT there are also a few liberties of which ardent Janeites will not approve. Kissing, for starters. And a secret engagement that on the written page seems so shocking induces no gasps here.
Also, I wondered about the casting of Callum Turner, though a fine young actor, as Frank Churchill. Does he look like a man to set female hearts all aflutter?
Not according to my wife, a novelist herself, who is devoted to all of Austen’s
books. She sat alongside me at the screening, and uttered what in the circumstances was best described as a harrumph. Afterwards, she suggested that Emma, more than most Austen novels, is better suited to a TV dramatisation over several episodes than to cinema. The title character has to be given a chance to mature, which is not easily done in a couple of hours.
She might be right. But all I can report is that the smile hardly ever left my face, and there were a few actual chuckles too, most of them supplied by Miranda Hart.
She is delightful (though my wife thought her miscast) as poor old Miss Bates, at least until she ends up as the victim of Emma’s waspish tongue at a singularly awkward Box Hill picnic.
Unsurprisingly, given the director’s pedigree, music looms large and loud in this film. Orchestras swell and string quartets swoon. Sweetly, the score also includes some old English folk songs.
The co- composer is Isobel Waller- Bridge, whose sister Phoebe has had a hand in the screenplay of the forthcoming new Bond film — a very different kettle of fish indeed, in which it’s safe to assume that 007 will utter nothing as romantic as Mr Knightley’s immortal line: ‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’
You have to admit, that’s a corker for Valentine’s Day.
RECENTLY, I interviewed the Forrest Gump and Back To The Future director Robert Zemeckis, who mused that 30 years from now cinema will look different because influences on film-makers are evolving all the time. ‘Television changed the way films were made, then TV commercials, then music videos, and now the internet,’ he said cheerfully.
He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t stop me getting prickly about Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s something about films inspired by video-game franchises that seems so commercially cold and calculating. Shouldn’t it at least be the other way around?
Maybe I should just chill out. Maybe, cashing in on the success of video-game characters is not that far removed from adapting books such as Emma.
To do it properly, though, means getting the look absolutely right. All hell broke loose among Sonic fans when the trailer came out last year, and the computergenerated hedgehog looked all wrong.
So the release date was pushed back several months, and here we are. He still doesn’t look remotely like a hedgehog, but the gamers are happy.
The story sees Sonic — who, as I’m sure you’re aware, is an intergalactic adventurer capable of moving at supersonic speeds — landing in the fictional town of Green Hills, Montana.
He accidentally causes a massive power cut, and the political and military top brass decide to send in a mad, evil scientist, Dr Robotnik (an off-the-leash Jim carrey), to investigate.
By now, Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) has been befriended by the Green Hills sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), who must keep him out of Robotnik’s fiendish clutches.
It’s all moderate fun, in a crazy way, and there are a few references to the Fast And Furious films intended to keep grown-ups entertained — but considering the children it’s mostly aimed at, there’s an awful lot of comicbook violence.
I can see it having the same sugar-rush effect on some kids as the entire contents of a pick ’n’ mix stand — so don’t say you haven’t been warned.
A shorter version of the emma review ran in earlier editions