Film review

  • Emma.

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Autumn de Wilde (2020)

    Is it time already for another screen Emma?  Arguably so – it’s twenty-four years since the only previous English-language cinema adaptation of the novel, which coincided with the last but one television version.  (The most recent TV Emma was in 2009.)  Besides, it’s never too soon for more Jane Austen in the view of plenty of her admirers – those who seem to find it hard to accept she wrote only seven completed novels.  (That total includes Lady Susan, source of Whit Stillman’s 2016 film, Love & Friendship.  I seem to think this short, epistolary work joined the six bigger books in the Austen novels canon only recently.)  The past year has already seen Andrew Davies’s latest TV Austen – eight one-hour (less commercials) episodes of the unfinished Sanditon, which necessarily involved more invention than adaptation on Davies’s part.  Fans are begging for a second series.

    Best known for photography and music videos, Autumn de Wilde is directing her first cinema feature with this new film.  The script is by Eleanor Catton, who has won the Man Booker Prize for fiction but hadn’t written for the screen before.  (Catton has now also adapted her Booker-winner The Luminaries for a forthcoming TV miniseries.)   De Wilde shows a few signs of feeling she needs to make Emma ‘different’.  Styling the title with a full stop for a start (acknowledged in the heading of this note but nowhere else in it).  There’s also some surprising casting.  The innovative urge doesn’t run deep, though.  At first, de Wilde seems intent, rather, on doing honour to Jane Austen à la Andrew Davies.  In his first scene, Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn) is naked for a few seconds as he waits for his valet to dress him.  (The BBFC certificate warning card describes this as ‘brief natural nudity’ – as distinct from ‘unnatural’ nudity?)  Over at Hartfield, Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) stands with her back to the fire and, with no one else in the room, pulls her skirts up to warm her bum.  The trademark Davies touches more or less dry up after that.  Until, perhaps, Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) lies on a sofa while Knightley uncovers the foot she may have injured as she fled pursuing gipsies.  The examination elicits orgasmic yelps from Harriet.  I’m not even sure that’s how de Wilde intends the cries to be heard but, if it is, they’re a wittier touch than Daviesisms usually are.

    I’m a fan of Douglas McGrath’s 1996 film of Emma and couldn’t help but compare them, as I watched de Wilde’s version.  As well as successfully streamlining the novel, McGrath gave proceedings a fast tempo that helped the film’s momentum and seemed to reflect Emma Woodhouse’s unhesitating, hasty thinking.  After seeing this new film and checking its length against McGrath’s, I was amazed to find the latter is only four minutes shorter.  Time passes much less quickly in the de Wilde Emma, partly the result of lingering over opulent settings, especially Knightley’s pile.  (The film’s Donwell Abbey is actually Wilton House near Salisbury.  According to the Condé Nast ‘Traveler’ website, the place has a lengthy filmography and its rooms regularly feature as Buckingham Palace interiors in The Crown.  Even allowing for Knightley’s wealth, the effect is a bit OTT.)  But de Wilde also slows things down by over-emphasis, in scenes minor and major. As Emma and Harriet converse over afternoon tea, de Wilde focuses on Harriet, making conspicuous efforts, as she talks and listens, to manage both her teacup and the little cake she’s eating.  Mia Goth plays this amusingly enough – or would do if the camera didn’t take root and gaze as though challenging her to keep being amusing.

    The outing to Box Hill is more thoroughly overdone.  The crux of this is the game that Emma, via Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), insists on being played by the party – each person to say ‘either one thing very clever … or two things moderately clever … or three things very dull indeed’[1].  Miss Bates (Miranda Hart), the good-hearted, come-down-in-the-world spinster who reliably irritates Emma, is relieved by the last option:  ‘I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I?’  To which Emma replies, ‘but there may be a difficulty … you will be limited as to number – only three at once’.  Miranda Hart’s expression of Miss Bates’s shocked hurt at the remark is very affecting but de Wilde has too many others in the company register the unkind words – even Emma notices Miss Bates’s stricken face.  A reader of the novel knows only that Knightley realises Miss Bates’s distress and that Emma certainly doesn’t.  When Knightley later takes her to task for her ‘insolent’ wit, she has to call it to mind even in order to know what he’s talking about.

    Part of what makes this moment so powerful in the book is that Miss Bates, to nearly all her companions at Box Hill, is of so little account that her humiliation goes largely unnoticed – not least because Miss Bates knows her place and to conceal her feelings as quickly as possible.  Autumn de Wilde has Miranda Hart continue to show these feelings:  Miss Bates’s upset is unignorable.  It therefore makes no sense when Emma herself is shocked by Knightley’s dressing-down.  Johnny Flynn shouts this reprimand, which seems wrong but, as the climax to a generally overwrought episode, is probably inevitable.

    The theatrical release poster includes an image of the heroine and the words ‘HANDSOME, CLEVER, AND RICH’.   These are taken from the novel’s first sentence, which de Wilde does well to quote in full on the screen at the start[2].  Even so, those three adjectives on the poster serve as advance notice that the protagonist isn’t going to be likeable – and represent an ascending order of offputtingness, despite the film’s swooning over the trappings of gracious living.  This predicts Anya Taylor-Joy’s portrayal, as well as hinting that de Wilde’s Emma may be more enjoyable if you’re keen to see stressed the title character’s least appealing qualities.

    Quoting the novel’s opening is a useful reminder of how very young Emma is; although she’s actually twenty-three, Taylor-Joy, with her somehow inchoate features, might otherwise seem too young.  In her interpretation, Emma’s tender age and lack of experience (which are also implied in Austen’s introduction of her) don’t, however, mitigate her entitled, self-satisfied and heedless behaviour in matchmaking and judging character.  The year before the Emma cinema and TV adaptations of 1996, the writer-director Amy Heckerling reworked Austen’s novel into a contemporary coming-of-age comedy, whose characters were teenagers in Beverly Hills, and called it Clueless.  Anya Taylor-Joy is never that.  She doesn’t at all suggest Emma’s obliviousness to the mistakes she’s making and the romantic havoc she’s causing.  For the most part, her face shows Emma’s scheming side to the exclusion of any other.

    Taylor-Joy’s accentuate-the-negative characterisation sets up the film’s ending to fail, which it duly does.  She may have learned her lesson in the short term but this Emma lacks the potential to grow and change for the better.  Her marriage to Knightley made me feel merely sorry for him.  This isn’t the only problem with their final union.  Emma’s surprised realisation that she loves Knightley doesn’t have the impact it should have – and did have in Douglas McGrath’s film, thanks to clearer storytelling and better acting.  In de Wilde’s version, it’s not evident why Knightley is such a regular visitor to Hartfield if not as a suitor.  At the ball hosted by Mr and Mrs Weston (Rupert Graves and Gemma Whelan), Emma agrees to dance with Knightley because ‘You have shown that you can dance, and you know that we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper’.   In McGrath’s version, Jeremy Northam delivered Knightley’s reply – ‘Brother and sister! No indeed’ – in a memorably throttled voice, just right for letting the audience know Knightley’s feelings without Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma picking up on them.  In the new film’s corresponding scene, the facial expressions and body language of Anya Taylor-Joy and Johnny Flynn reveal undisguised mutual attraction.  The delay in acting upon this feels artificial.

    At nearly thirty-seven, Flynn is exactly the same age as Austen’s Knightley and a couple of years older than Jeremy Northam when he played the role.  Flynn seems too young, though, thanks to his ungroomed look and an emotional candour that makes Knightley’s feelings too easy to read.  (This must be weak direction, rather than intrinsic to Flynn, given the successfully ambiguous character he created in Michael Pearce’s Beast.)   In the book and the earlier film, Knightley comes across not only as elder brother but quasi-father figure, especially when he quietly but firmly criticises Emma’s behaviour to her face – something that her actual father, preoccupied with health concerns, isn’t disposed to do.  There’s no sense of that in Flynn’s playing.  He has some effective moments – as when, for example, Knightley calmly and decisively puts Mrs Elton (Tanya Reynolds) in her place when she tries to take over the planning of a visit to Donwell Abbey.  I never felt Johnny Flynn quite had a handle on the character, though.

    Even though casting against type is a relative term with actors as versatile as some of these are, Bill Nighy and Josh O’Connor are unexpected choices to play, respectively, Emma’s valetudinarian father and Mr Elton, the young vicar less inclined to serve God than Mammon.  In both cases, the choice gradually loses its initially refreshing appeal.  Nighy, witty as ever, whizzes round with a forthright energy unusual for a timorous hypochondriac.  Superbly dressed (by Alexandra Byrne) in richly-patterned house jackets and formal coats of subtler tones, he cuts a dashing figure in more ways than one.  By the end, it’s rather puzzling that Mr Woodhouse, along with everyone else, hasn’t (re)tied the knot.  Josh O’Connor is one of Britain’s very best young screen actors, and has a gift for comedy.  (As Prince Charles in The Crown, he’s very funny, as well as deeply sympathetic.)  O’Connor makes you laugh when Elton first opens his mouth in church but he seems increasingly uneasy.  He looks to be still trying out ideas for playing the part.

    Although the director detracts from her big Box Hill moment by prolonging and stressing it, Miranda Hart does well as Miss Bates – she’s de Wilde’s most successful piece of striking casting.  You don’t think of Miss Bates as oppressing Emma through her physical size as well as her incontinent chatter.  Hart gives Miss Bates a consistent streak of self-consciousness that makes her eagerness to please more painful.   I found myself enjoying some of the film’s peripheral moments and supporting characters more than I did the centres of attention:  Harriet and some other young girls playing a comical game with what looks like a sandcastle made from flour; the way that Harriet’s first love and eventual husband, the young farmer Robert Martin (Connor Swindells), quietly develops from a doltish into a more romantic figure; the piano and violin duet of Knightley and Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson), except for the red herring amorous look that she shoots him at the start of it.  Otherwise, I liked Amber Anderson – and Callum Turner even more.  The genial, slightly restless arrogance he gives Frank Churchill seems not only right:  it also explains Emma’s misreading of the signals Frank seems to be giving out.

    The Jane-Knightley duet also includes some nice singing from Johnny Flynn, whose voice is also heard in the folkish songs that punctuate the action.  (It’s recognisable on these thanks to the lovely theme song Flynn wrote and performed for BBC’s Detectorists, reasonably praised by Adam Mars-Jones as ‘the best pastoral comedy since As You Like It’).  This is decidedly the better part of the soundtrack.  Adverse criticism of a Waller-Bridge is almost unheard of just at present but Emma‘s score, by Phoebe’s sister Isobel and David Schweitzer, is gruesome.  For the first half-hour or so, Autumn de Wilde uses this isn’t-this-amusing music almost incessantly.  Thereafter even she seems to get tired of it – another example of the film’s fitfulness.  The question I began this note with also came up, just a few weeks ago, in relation to Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.  Gerwig answered it in the affirmative:  her film coherently and enterprisingly reinterprets Louisa M Alcott’s original, while showing unmistakable affection for it.   Watchable as it is, Autumn de Wilde’s Emma is distinctly short on coherence, on enterprise too.

    19 February 2020

    [1]  The quotes in this note are from the novel.  The film’s script may not reproduce them verbatim but doesn’t depart significantly from the original.

    [2]  ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’

  • On the Waterfront

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1954)

    In consecutive years of the 1950s, a commercial and critical hit also ended up winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and two acting Oscars.  What’s more, the films in question fully deserved their success.  Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront both tell gripping stories.  They include plenty of action without this dominating at the expense of character.  (They do what screen drama is essentially designed to do:  they reveal and develop character through action.)  From Here to Eternity’s script is the more remarkable in that Daniel Taradash distilled James Jones’s mammoth novel (nearer 900 than 800 pages) into a film of just under two hours.  Budd Schulberg’s original screenplay for On the Waterfront is less expansive but the resulting movie shares with From Here to Eternity an epic quality that doesn’t derive from great length – Kazan’s film runs only 108 minutes – or narrative scope.  These feel like big pictures because they deal convincingly with subjects and people that matter.

    New Jersey dockworker Terry Malloy was once a promising boxer.  Terry’s career in the ring ended thanks to Michael J Skelly, aka ‘Johnny Friendly’, the Mob-connected boss of the longshoremen’s union.  He owned a sizeable piece of Terry the prizefighter and ordered him to lose a crucial match so that Friendly could win a bet.  The order to throw the fight came via  Charley ‘the Gent’ Malloy, Friendly’s right-hand man and Terry’s elder brother.   It’s common knowledge that Friendly is behind much worse offences, including several killings.  Attempts by the Port of New York and New Jersey Crime Commission to bring him and his associates to justice are thwarted by the muting fear of dockworkers whose livelihoods effectively depend on tyrannical Friendly’s say-so.  A young docker called Joey Doyle is an exception to the rule.  He’s prepared to testify to the Crime Commission against Johnny Friendly.

    That’s the backstory to On the Waterfront.  The narrative proper begins with Terry (Marlon Brando) talking neighbour Joey (Ben Wagner) into going up on the roof of the Hoboken tenement building where he lives.  Moments later, Joey falls from the roof, sustaining fatal injuries.  Terry knew Friendly’s men were going to lean on Joey.  He didn’t realise they were going to push him to his death.  His father (John F Hamilton) calls a priest; as Father Barry (Karl Malden) prays beside the young man’s body, Joey’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) furiously rejects the priest’s assurance that ‘time and faith are great healers’.  She wants to know who killed her brother.  With Edie in tow, Barry, the ‘waterfront priest’, convenes a meeting of dockworkers in his church and asks them, ‘How can we call ourselves Christians and protect these murderers with our silence?’

    Terry is sent by Charley (Rod Steiger) to attend and report back on the church meeting.  In the event, Friendly’s men break up the gathering.   Terry helps Edie escape the violence and is immediately taken with her (she soon reciprocates).  His feelings for Edie and Father Barry’s words germinate Terry’s increasing crisis of conscience, which is the heart of the story.  Subpoenaed to testify to the Waterfront Crime Commission, he intends at first to remain silent.  He eventually decides to change his mind and risk his life.  For telling the truth, he loses his job and suffers serious physical injury but Terry emerges victorious from the film’s truly climactic final scene, a showdown on the docks with Friendly (Lee J Cobb).

    His portrait of Terry Malloy illustrates not only Marlon Brando’s greatness as an actor but also his seminal importance as an influence on film acting.  He is thoroughly physically convincing:  Terry is a young, strong man who still uses his brawn to earn a living but isn’t in the kind of shape he was in his boxing days.  Brando is intellectually right too.  The hero struggles to work out mentally what he should do; more often than not, he has to feel things out.  Brando is affecting in the famous ‘I could have been a contender’ dialogue between the Malloy brothers.  He’s best of all in Terry’s scenes with Edie, first beside a couple of children’s swings in a scrubby park, then in a bar.  Both those sequences are extended, especially the one in the bar.  Kazan’s readiness to let a conversational exchange between characters continue for some time in the same place, rooted in confidence that limited physical movement doesn’t make a scene emotionally static, is an important part of his influence on American films.

    So too is his direction of actors.  Although the styles of the supporting players are various, Kazan orchestrates them.  In the one significant female role (and her cinema debut), Eva Marie Saint is eager but authentically passionate.  Her physicality is very expressive:  Saint’s Edie is willowy but wiry too.   The character is a trainee teacher with brains that Terry lacks but the mutual attraction between them is wholly believable.  As Charley, described as ‘a butcher in a camel coat’, Rod Steiger anticipates the quietly brutal professionalism of the likes of Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen in The Godfather nearly twenty years later.  Steiger’s persistent greyness in the early stages makes Charley’s later outbursts of verbal violence all the more startling.  Kazan cast a fine assortment of shapes, sizes and faces in the smaller docker and/or hood parts – this also seems to foretell the precise, imaginative casting of The Godfather films.   (Francis Ford Coppola has spoken of his admiration for and debt to Kazan.)  Martin Balsam, also making his big-screen debut after several years of TV work, registers in his uncredited appearance as one of the Crime Commission men.

    It’s Kazan’s success in blending the performances of Lee J Cobb and Karl Malden into a satisfying whole that’s the most impressive aspect of his direction.  Cobb and Malden had both worked with Kazan in the New York Group Theatre in the 1930s and in one or more of his earlier films but their acting seems more traditional than that of others in On the Waterfront.  It’s true the roles of Friendly and Barry are relatively bluntly conceived.  This may largely explain why Malden, a reliably good actor, comes across as a bit of a cliché as the tough-talking man of God.  Although my experience of Lee J Cobb is that he needed little encouragement to overdo things, Friendly too isn’t the greatest part.  He’s written as a familiar villain – right through to the end when, his evil spell broken by Terry’s courage, he vows snarling revenge.  Yet neither performance seems incongruous, so cogently does Kazan harmonise the playing.

    That musical verb is apt in pointing to another element that helps Kazan achieve this balance.  Leonard Bernstein’s score, his only original film composition, is powerful.  It sometimes seems too powerful, to be competing with what you’re already getting from the actors and the story.  Yet the strong-arming music (like Cobb’s excessive acting) serves also to define On the Waterfront as a tragic melodrama.   This isn’t to disparage the film.  Kazan somehow persuades you that if it were less melodramatic, it wouldn’t be so potently tragic.

    Terry and Joey Doyle both keep and race pigeons   At the start, Terry lures Joey by telling him he’s found one of Joey’s prized birds, which went missing after the most recent race.  A real pigeon is thus used as a decoy bird.  Terry eventually becomes a stool pigeon.  Kazan and Budd Schulberg have Tommy (Thomas Handley) – the kid who admires Terry, helps look after his rooftop pigeon loft but kills the birds when Terry testifies against Friendly – justify himself with the tearful accusation, ‘A pigeon for a pigeon!’  In other words, this avian metaphor is seriously overworked but it doesn’t feel that way:  the scenes between Brando and Thomas Handley[1] are so naturally and affectingly done.   The film was shot mostly in and around Hoboken, and in black-and-white.  Kazan, his cinematographer Boris Kaufman and art director Richard Day give the locations, indoors and out, a singular reality – unspectacular yet vivid.

    On the Waterfront started life as ‘Crime on the Waterfront’ a series of newspaper articles in late 1948, which won for their author Malcolm Johnson a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.  The first version of the screenplay was written by Arthur Miller in 1951, when he and Kazan were still on good terms.  The following year, Kazan, after initially refusing to give evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, named eight former Group Theatre members who had been Communists.  His testimony, enough to ensure that Kazan remained a controversial figure for the rest of his long life (he died in 2003 at the age of ninety-four), ended his friendship with Miller.   When Budd Schulberg took the script over, he conducted interviews with, among others, the whistleblower longshoreman Johnny De Vincenzo and Father John M Corridan, the real-life inspirations for Terry Malloy and Father Barry respectively.

    Schulberg had also appeared before HUAC to give ‘friendly testimony’ (the adjective makes the nickname of Lee J Cobb’s character all the more striking).  Just as Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, two years previously, resonates with the screenwriter Carl Foreman’s isolation in the light of refusing to name names to HUAC, so On the Waterfront is widely seen as Schulberg’s and Kazan’s response to criticism for taking the opposite position.  Whether this gave extra passion and focus to Kazan’s work is hard to say but On the Waterfront shows him and Marlon Brando at their very best.

    15 February 2020

    [1] Handley’s IMDb biography makes fascinating reading: ‘Thomas Handley’s father, a longshoreman, was blackballed for opposing corrupt union leaders. He disappeared when Handley was 4 months old, and may have been murdered by the gang that controlled the New York docks. … Handley was initially hired to feed the pigeons on the set of  On the Waterfront … but Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had him audition for the movie. … He went on to become a longshoreman himself, and in 2002 was elected recording secretary of his union after the leadership was ousted for corruption.’

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