It’s sometimes difficult to remember why filmmakers keep returning to the well of Jane Austen …until the next Jane Austen adaptation comes along and sweeps us up. There’s just something innately interesting and endearing about the work, as far removed by both era and class as we may be from such stories and characters. Perhaps it is the charming Regency elegance paired with social, domestic, and economic critique, or her sharply drawn, compelling, immortal female protagonists like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and of course Emma Woodhouse; or it could just be that her romances are so incredibly likeable. Whatever the reason, it’s no particular mystery why in 2020, yet another Jane Austen movie has reached the big screen in the form of a new version of Emma adapted by novelist Eleanor Catton and directed by acclaimed photographer and music video director Autumn de Wilde, in her feature debut.
The film certainly shows the signs of having been made by someone with a background in portraiture, full of a lot of centred compositions, medium to close shots, elaborate backdrops, vibrant lighting and costuming choices, and an often still camera that gives it at times an almost Wes Anderson or Ozu appearance. However, de Wilde is no strict stickler to style. She keeps the films’ pace dynamic and its imagery versatile as she stages and arranges each scene so as to emphasize the story’s overall comedy.
Emma is perhaps the most light-hearted of Austens’ novels, driven by a vain, spoiled, and over-confident title character who in Austens’ own words, “had lived twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” The stakes aren’t terribly serious and the plot is beheld to a lot of matchmaking, and near farcical levels of misunderstanding. As such, de Wilde and Catton play the story as a kind of screwball comedy, with fast-talking, intelligent, incredibly witty characters bouncing off or at times over one another as sexual or romantic tension builds within a rigid social and class framework highlighted primarily for its absurdism. Anya Taylor-Joy definitely appears to be channeling Katherine Hepburn in more than a couple scenes and her exchanges with Johnny Flynn’s George Knightley wouldn’t be out of place in It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, or indeed The Thin Man. And yet they’re still quintessentially Austen, though being incorporated under this particular approach allows them and the movie itself to attain a unique rhythm and tone all its’ own.
Taylor-Joy is delightful in the title role, sharp and confident and modern for all of her flowery language and etiquette. In her greatest moments of determinism and deceitful cordiality she strikes me as someone who would play Thackeray’s Becky Sharp extraordinarily well, but her softer instances are just as unmistakably true. More than other actresses who have played this part, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Alicia Silverstone, she gracefully reveals the at-times conflicting layers of the character subtly alluded to throughout the film, so that she’s never quite as unlikeable as Austen intended. Of course it helps that much like the characters at the forefront of Blackadder or Blazing Saddles, she seems to be the only self-aware figure in her entire world. Through much of the movie she is the unofficial mistress to Mia Goth’s sweet but naive Harriet Smith, who she attempts to contrive into a marriage with the foppish local reverend and worst person of the story Mr. Elton (Josh O’Connor).
The offbeat pairing of Emma and Harriet is actually the cornerstone of the film, one of the ways de Wilde and Catton reinvent the story to be as much about the evolution of a female friendship as a romance; and Harriet has as many potential partners as Emma, including the enigmatic though irresponsible Frank Churchill (Callum Turner) and the shy and humble farmer Robert Martin (Connor Swindells). Given the finite scope of its setting like many an Austen story, the impressionable and eccentric supporting characters of Emma have plenty opportunity to pop in now and again throughout the narrative -creating a real, tangible sense of community- and de Wilde assembled a terrific ensemble for it that has no weak link. Bill Nighy as the drearily sardonic father and Miranda Hart as the obtrusive gossip are natural choices of course, but the film features good turns as well from a pompous Tanya Reynolds, a talented but quietly sad Amber Anderson, and two couples: the delightfully mismatched in-laws Chloe Pirrie and Oliver Chris, and the just as delightfully charming neighbours Rupert Graves and Gemma Whalen.
Chief among this supporting cast though is obviously Johnny Flynn as Knightley, Emma’s most prominent love interest and clever verbal sparring partner; dashing yet awkward as Flynn plays the part with amiable charisma and matching levels of sincerity and humour to Taylor-Joy -with whom he shares great chemistry. The scene between them, and indeed the rest of the cast, each of whom have their own story threads at work simultaneously, at the Christmas dance is exceptionally nice and charming. Flynn also sings the beautifully whimsical closing folk tune “Queen Bee”.
The rest of the films’ soundtrack is lovely as well, composed by David Schweitzer and Fleabag’s Isobel Waller-Bridge; which alongside the luscious art direction and exquisitely decadent costuming conveys the Regency atmosphere and fashionable taste with such munificent aplomb it might be in danger of subverting the story’s socially satirical aims.
But de Wilde accounts for that rather brilliantly, the film ultimately fulfilling every objective of the story while still being a distinct specimen in style and vision. Though perhaps not as vividly modern or thematically urgent as Little Women, Emma (though it likely didn’t intend to) follows amicably in its footsteps -just as creatively passionate and indebted to the work its adapting as Greta Gerwig’s recent masterpiece. I would hope that future classic literary adaptations are a fraction as joyful.
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