Review of Emma. (2020) by Hnestlyonthesly — 11 Mar 2020

“I like all their stupid little hats,” Wife told me after we left when I asked her what she thought and if this (or any) adaptation of Jane Austen was immediate or necessary. I was thinking about the way that period films about domestic drama have come into vogue again, first with The Favourite, then Gerwig’s Little Women, and now with Emma. Wife, who, for the record, says she’s read the book twice and looked a little bit miffed when I interrupted her in the middle of a spirited synopsis two days ago before we went to see it, confirmed what I had secretly and probably unsurprisingly harbored close to my heart for years, “Austen isn’t radical anymore.” What she meant was, marrying for love, dramatizing the domestic affairs of young women, their erotic journey, their subjugation of want for duty or good manners, is mainstream. “The plot of Emma is about women marrying their station: rich women marrying upper class men and so on and so on,” Wife clarified. “It’s not like Jane Eyre.” I am again reminded of the play After Mrs Rochester by Polly Teale that gets me in the gut every time, a play that tries to address the tediousness of colonial capitalism in Jane Eyre and its contemporaries.

Eleanor Catton, surprise winner of the Booker Award-winning novel The Luminaries, wrote the screenplay, which I thought would shine through. I’m reading her debut novel, The Rehearsal, right now and it’s caustic and funny and oddly prescient about the language and observations it makes about teen girls’ sexuality and sexualization years before the #MeToo movement. Catton is brilliant about layering language, making dialogue feel poetic and “recursive”–to borrow a phrase from Alice Fulton last week–and building these moments of emotional high tension in the everyday. I’m still not sure, because of my lack of familiarity with the deviations between the novel and screenplay, what elements are added and which are original to Austen, but I tend to think that maybe Catton is a little underutilized in the act of adaptation.

The moment I find most memorable and suspect has the most potential to deviate from its source material is Mr Knightley’s pseudo-proposal under the arbor toward the end, when he rubs Emma’s cheek and she moans, erotic, pained, regretful, and her nose starts to bleed because of how much stress she’s under, which constitutes this moment of excellent low comedy juxtaposed with the emotional climax of the movie. Anya Taylor-Joy’s delivery is fabulous and classic to her persona, cementing for me her ability to elevate everything she works on whether its Thoroughbreds or Split or the upcoming X-Men debacle.

What I suspect is the climax of the novel, the picnic scene where Emma’s acidic wit reveals itself as lacking judgement and control feels doubly excellent on screen. It’s a moment akin to another film I’ve returned to recently, Blinded by the Light (and in a larger way in Florence Pugh’s performance of Fighting With My Family, where our focalized narrative that’s allowed for us to laugh at the unkind eye rolls and clever side comments is opened up a little so that we can see the emotional collateral damage that these jokes have wrought. We laugh and then when no one but the confusingly mean Robert Martin laughs along–it took me awhile to think through the kind of person you’d have to be to flirt with your fiancée’s rival at a party as a beard for your own secret relationship by actively making fun of her appearance and station: “Martin’s egging Emma on,” Wife explained to me afterwards, picking up on her mean streak and setting her up for disappointment later, which feels like a next-level form of long-term prank planning.

I’m of two minds about this movie, because on the one hand, the acting is a thing of true beauty, especially considering the fact that Mr Elton is played by the sloppy millennial from the indie movie Hope Gap that no one will ever see except maybe on a plane or a sick day on Amazon Prime in a few years and he is so excellent as a weirdo! Taylor-Joy is fabulous and there are some ways in which this movie transports you from the present insanity of the moment, but at the same time, this is brain candy, the emptiest of calories. I’m giving this is a cautious recommendation.