Do we need another Emma? There was the genius transposition to American high school that was Clueless in 1995, followed in 1996 by a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and an ITV adaptation with Kate Beckinsale. Since then there’s been the 2010 Indian take on Clueless, Aisha, and in 2009 the BBC’s four-part serial with Romola Garai. Enough already perhaps?
This Emma proves otherwise. The directorial debut of the photographer and music video artist Autumn de Wilde, scripted by the Booker-winning novelist Eleanor Catton and brilliantly cast, it has an energy all of its own. Although it remains a classic literary adaptation faithful to its source, it is absolutely of its own time too (as all such re-renderings are, even if the extent of that inflection only becomes obvious when they have themselves become a period piece).
Anya Taylor-Joy, 23, plays Emma Woodhouse, the would-be matchmaker with “the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself”, as Austen warns us. She famously remarked that she was “going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like” — and Taylor-Joy boldly gives us a pretty thoroughly dislikeable Emma for the first two-thirds of the film — not just headstrong, manipulative and conceited, but petulant and sullen too. Presented to us directly like this, rather than through the ironies of indirect style, she’s actually quite objectionable — which only makes her later realisation of how mistaken she has been, the unkindnesses she has committed, all the more moving and convincing.
Mia Goth is wonderfully gawping and credulous as her naïve protégé Harriet Smith and, as you would suppose, Bill Nighy is just perfect as Emma’s valetudinarian father. Then there’s another classic turn by Miranda Hart as gabbling Miss Bates, exasperating and endearing at once, so touching in the moment when she understands how cruelly she has been snubbed by Emma at the Box Hill picnic.
All round, the casting favours hotties du jour, albeit hotties gone wrong in the case of the d*** of a vicar Mr Elton (Josh O’Connor, The Crown) and his snobby cow of a wife (Tanya Reynolds, Sex Education). Callum Turner is dashing as the deceptive Frank Churchill, Amber Anderson full of suppressed feeling as Jane Fairfax. And then there’s Mr Knightley...
At 36, Johnny Flynn is actually perfectly age-appropriate for the part but he seems drastically young and punky for this sage figure. To emphasise that, we first meet him stripping off after a journey — but there’s no need to underline his physical presence. He’s solid all right, but he’s also sensual, even a touch feral in the way revealed so powerfully in Beast, and there’s (for Austen) real sexuality in his rapport with Emma, especially when they dance at the ball.
Johnny Flynn is also completely contemporary in his looks, movements, expressions and diction, as are the rest of the cast. It sets up a weird tension with not just the formality and rigid conventions of the society depicted but also the very fabric of the film, for it is lavishly period-furnished in every way, including in its language. The cast have some difficulty delivering some of the longer, more formal speeches Catton has loyally preserved, speaking as they do without the assumption of class.
As a modern man, Flynn seems perpetually struggling to be free of his high, starched collar. The clothes are foppish, the houses superlatively grand, and de Wilde, with her production designer Kave Quinn and costume designer Alexandra Byrne, has colour-coded every scene in what is claimed to be Georgian style. The film’s score, by Isobel Waller Bridge and David Schweitzer, has been similarly over-themed, horribly busy and emphatic — it would have more impact if only the music generated in the scenes was heard (plus Johnny Flynn’s original song, Queen Bee, over the end credits), but perhaps no music video director would deny herself so much.
Yet if the whole film looks Instagram-ready, the way the actors seem so contemporary saves it from stuffiness, historicism and pastiche. So it’s an odd, hot mix, this. Superficially faithful, with no diverse casting, gender revision, or apparent updating at all, it nonetheless shows us what we might make of Austen’s stratified world now. That regime of property and gentility, those allocated roles, that unforgiving marriage market, all the things she accepted as unalterable. Just the outing for that other anachronism, Valentine’s Day, then.
Must-see films arriving in February
