8 - Emma, interrupted: speaking Jane Austen in fiction and film

Summary

New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane, in a characteristically intelligent review of Douglas McGrath's 1995 film production of Emma, offered a rather sharp condemnation of the film, one with interesting implications for most modern adaptations of Jane Austen's novels. The problem with the film, Lane argues, is not that it makes no sense, but that it makes “easy, do-it-yourself sense.” Reducing Emma's “artful” construction “around the ethics of plotting” to a “thinness” of romance, McGrath has made his film too easy to watch. Even such seeming accidents as its remarkable miscastings (he singles out, wonderfully, the “under the hill” Mr. Knightley of Jeremy Northam) contribute to an Austen of few narrative jolts, and of disturbingly even tone. The tensions we cannot resolve on reading her fiction (as he phrases them, “Is she affectionate or flinty? Does her tolerance float free, or does it exist to peg back her anger?”) are here dissolved into a patina as even as the decorations on “the lids of cake tins,” and the disturbing confusion of Emma's narration (is she in charge of her world or in the grip of it?) is here quieted into a matchmaking fantasy that never quite takes its heroine or its viewer by surprise. While remarking, as have all critics in popular and scholarly accounts, on the perfect poise and grace of Gwyneth Paltrow (her cheekbones, he asserts, “would cut a swath through communities far plusher than Highbury”), Lane finds in the very perfection of the filmic presentation a sacrifice of the true spirit of Austen's fiction: like other critics, who preferred instead the poor-theater textual faithfulness of Roger Michell's Persuasion, the more refined balance of Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, and even the modern high-school community of Clueless, he resists the charms and the ease of the McGrath/Paltrow Emma.