Emma 2020

Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen through the hands of Autumn de Wilde (director) and Eleanor Catton (Screenwriter)

Or: Eye of the Beholder

A young woman stands in front of a fireplace, cold and flawless as marble, shadowed in the dark of her stately home, while her maid plucks her gown into its best drape. All is still except the crackling of flames, the industry of the servant, and the twitching of the lady’s hands, flexing with impatience. Is she contemplating a feud? A spurned lover? The war with Napoleon? No. When the maid finishes and shuttles off, out of the room, the picture of elegance hikes up her skirts to soak up more warmth on her naked skin.

The young mooner is Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) handsome, clever, and rich and so fortunate as to be placed (by personal inclination and a kind if hypochondriacal father (Bill Nighy) outside the marriage market, where she now sees herself not as a seller but a broker. Moving amongst the small but respectable high society of the village of Highbury, linking lives and passing judgment, Taylor-Joy spends much of the movie in a serene remove, as though the elegance we see is projected by her own mind, her imagination superimposed on the world around her. Troubles may stir, but no ruffle is too monstrous to be faced with poise and smoothed with aplomb. Elfin in feeling (fascinated by the world but yet apart of it) Emma glides through the world with as much crusading energy for excellence as her father expends thwarting drafts.

The only person who consistently flouts her out of this coolness, (and succeeding in sparking a human reaction) is her friend and in-law George Knightley (Johnny Flynn), a gentleman of similarly independent status and principals. He is equally driven but more interested in providing for his tenant farmers than setting up futures for girls like Harriet Smith (Mia Goth), eldest scion of the local girl’s school and Emma’s friend, protege, and pet project. Flynn’s standoffishness (never quite priggish but so straight-laced as to be binding) also peels off as he and Taylor-Joy bicker with all the strength of those deeply in love who just haven’t realized the fact yet.

And here is where screenwriter Catton shows her art. For while all the important scenes are faithfully in place (never has a put down had such weight or terrible sharpness as the Box Hill Gaffe. There where gasps and oohs and horrified yet exhilarated disapproval all throughout the audience) Catton sinews the timeless story for the quicker bound across the silver screen. Austen, no mean storyteller, unfolded her books gradually, like an artist adding small dabs of paint here and there that make the image spring out in full dimension. And the love stories, while germinating in the midst of the impersonal games of status and propriety, often only bloom at the very end; she is more interested in manners than passions, actions than oaths. But Catton places the inevitable realization (achingly sparked, then upped, then upped again by Flynn and Taylor-Joy) midway through the film, leaving too previously calm and collected individuals, to sweat and stress and doubt and dream and suffer oh so deliciously.

Catton also (and it is worth noting here that she is a novelist herself, turned for the first time to screenwriting) injects a note of class consciousness into the rarified air of Highbury. Nothing preachy or overdone but a reminder that there are real people driving the carriages, setting the tables and keeping the sheep off the lawn. Emma’s rich interior world is systemic to her entire class; the staff and commoners occupy the same space but a different reality. Director de Wilde litters her interiors with staff like statues (smoothly sailing through their duties and totally impassive, save for Mr. Woodhouse’s long suffering footmen, Charles (Edward Davis) and Bartholomew (Angus Imrie). At one point a trio of maids bob right through the middle of one of Emma’s and Mr. Knightley’s matches, never turning a hair, in another Frank Churchill (Callumn Turner) dances with Emma in the middle of the street around piles of furniture outside a joiners shop. The inclusion silently points to the general uselessness of the gentry, without once denouncing them or us for exulting their lives of ideal idleness.

It is also worth nothing here that this is also de Wilde’s first feature film, her name having been previously enshrined as a maker of album covers and music videos. The path she’s walked to high bury is visible in everyone of her her radiantly colorful, meticulously laid shots. The camera instead of clutching or dragging the action, allows its movement to be triggered by the actors, staying still to let the humans fall into the perfect tableaux, sometimes swinging away for a better view, sometimes cutting to the smallest motions as though it could not contain its excitement.

Churchill is the one dim star in a cast of luminaries. Churchill’s cachet, in story and out, lies in his absences and mystery, but onscreen Turner proves a mumbling, Eaton-masked dullard, given more characterization in the snide asides of Mr. Knightley than anything he provides (Flynn also leads the visual humor in the two men’s mutual and courteous dislike of each other). Fortunately he is easily outshined by Goth, who’s grin, far wider than regency regulated, and guilelessness make her a perfect match to the moony and poised Emma. The growth of their friendship, the ups and downs, the mutual uses, and final reconciliation between the bumbling ingenue and her blinkered chess master is in manny ways just as beautiful and touching as Emma’s relationship with Mr. Knightley.

We also get a fine performance by Miranda Hart as Miss. Bates (chief glitch in the perfection of the Woodhouse matrix) who manages to be believably boorish yet still tender and touching and deeply sympathetic to her audience. Other snippets of brilliance come from Oliver Chris as Emma’s brother-in-law John Kinghtley, the load-bearing pillar of a laughably strained marriage and Tanya Reynolds as Mrs. Elton, full of wise saws and deliciously cunning glances, provides a perfect foil to Taylor-Joy: both Emma and Mrs. Elton rearrange the world to suite their desires, but Mrs. Elton sees things differently from other people, in that she sees other people as things.

Most of all the movie’s crowning glory is not its wit, nor its unflaunted feminism (Catton gives Austen’s heroine a pointed speech on the inequalities of gender to Mr. Kightley completely in keeping with her time and status), nor it’s ultimate faithfulness to beloved novel but its sense of surprise. From that first unladylike hike of the skirts we are thrown beautiful curveballs that soar past our head, and hit squarely on their mark. Mr. Knightley’s erotic anguish (The film, and Flynn and Taylor-Joy being completely possessed by the specter of sex, without once cracking into lewdness or spoiling into carnality; a feat I had hitherto thought impossible) flings himself to the floor like a broken toy. A casual remark throws a dinner party into utter chaos. There was a horrifying second when I thought a major character was going to be struck down by the thunderbolt of fate and post-modern spite. It honor’s Jane Austen’s brilliance as a storyteller and wordsmith while changing enough to make us feel as though we’re visiting Highbury for the first time.

A final fine point is that, in the last minutes of the movie, Emma and Knightly hardly exchange smiles. The grins, when they are there, and shadowed and small; unbelieving. For the most part they are lost, mouths parted eyes staring, caught in a raging, upward rushing waterfall of a love supreme. It’s unlike anything I can recall seeing on film, gripping and and intensely real.

The last shot we see is Emma’s eyes, closed and still. It’s a simple shot but it seems, in the moment we are about to be released, like a lifting clear of all of her preconceptions, the beautiful world of lies she spun around herself. She is ready to leave it all behind and start a new life, one that is uncontrollable and infinitely better.