Hi everyone! If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I love Jane Austen, talking about Jane Austen, and discussing various adaptations of Jane Austen’s work. So I couldn’t watch the latest version of her novel ‘Emma’, directed by Autumn de Wilde, without putting a review on the blog, could I?
The first thing I will say about this film is it’s by no means an unpleasant watch. It’s a nice film. I enjoyed it. The costumes are astonishing – honestly, I could write a whole blog on the costumes alone, and I’m sure plenty of people have. Emma’s dresses are particularly amazing; if you haven’t seen the film, just google some photos of them and you’ll see what I mean.
However, it has failed to make the cut onto my list of ‘favourite Jane Austen adaptations ever’ simply because, to be blunt, it’s not as good as Clueless.
It might seem odd for me to put an Austen adaptation that most people don’t even realise is an Austen adaptation above a period drama set in Austen’s time. But you see, I don’t think Autumn de Wilde’s ‘Emma.’ is set in Austen’s time at all. It might say that it is, but to me, the film has a feel of the late 19th century rather than the Regency. The comedy is played up and the whole thing is tinged an Aesthetic sheen which gives it the air of an Oscar Wilde play. As a result, Austen’s characters become slightly two-dimensional as a result. Not that Oscar WIlde’s characters are two-dimensional at all when you look deeper, but trying to make other characters fit his style generally has that effect. In ‘Emma.’, de Wilde has taken the transition to film too far and tried to tell Austen’s entire story through visuals, losing the spirit of her satirical prose in the process. Yet she is not brave enough to actually set the play as a piece of 19th century theatre. It therefore falls into a strange no man’s land between what could be two extremely interesting perspectives. Clueless, after all, perfectly captures Austen’s spirit despite being set in the 1990s, and there is no reason that a film set in the 1890s could not do the same thing, if the director was only brave enough to own it.
There are certainly good performances in this film, such Miranda Hart as Miss Bates and Bill Nighy as Emma’s germ-obsessed father, but most were slightly strange interpretations of their characters. Harriet Smith comes across like a baby rather than a youthful and innocent girl, Mr Elton veers away from the slightly-boring-and-full-of-himself to the downright creepy, and Tanya Lou Reynolds as Mrs Elton fails to break out of the mould of Lily in Sex Education (granted, the hairstyle doesn’t help – I’m not sure Mrs Elton wore space-buns). Frank Churchill is not quite debonair enough, and not quite on screen enough (he actually does play quite a large role in Emma’s story, although you wouldn’t guess it from watching this adaptation). Johnny Flynn as Mr Knightley is watchable, if perhaps more suited to the role of a DH Lawrence hero than an Austen one, and I didn’t really sense much chemistry between him and Emma. As for Emma herself, Anya Taylor-Joy is certainly pretty, but is she Emma? I think that she could be; unfortunately but like the rest of the characters in this film, we never really get the chance to know her. Cher in Clueless was rich and spoiled, but we saw clearly that underneath it, she cared deeply for her father and her friends. This Emma does not seem to care much about anything, which meant that I found it hard to root for her as a central character. Austen may have said of Emma that ‘I am going to create a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like’, but the fact is, readers do like her despite her many flaws- a fact which de Wilde seems to have missed.
Austen’s characters are not caricatures, nor are they flat, and in this film, that is how they come across. I enjoyed the film as a light, charming watch one evening, but I didn’t feel any sense of emotional investment in the characters, or their fates. However, do I think people who are just looking for a pretty period drama without an obsessive academic interest in Austen, adaptation and the Regency period would enjoy this film? Absolutely, and if that’s you, give it a watch if only to see the beautiful costumes! As for myself, I’m off to watch the 1996 Emma and see how it compares.
What’s your favourite Jane Austen adaptation? Let me know in the comments below if there are any you want me to watch and review!
Cadence x
The Literature Lighthouse 