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.’
