Neither one thing nor the other

keith-moyes

There has been a glut of Austen recently. Since 1995 there have been at least 12 major movie or TV adaptations of her work.

Nonetheless, I was looking forward to this Emma. At four hours, it promised to be the most expansive version of any of her books since the famous 1995 Pride and Prejudice. It started well enough, but over the past four weeks my high hopes slowly ebbed away.

I have still enjoyed it. Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller may not be the definitive Emma and Knightley (probably nobody is) but they are both pretty good and there was definitely a chemistry between them. It generally moves forward at the right pace (neither racing nor crawling) and always looks good. But in the end I felt it was a somewhat lacklustre production and didn't compare too well with the other versions widely available on DVD. Still, it is not without its merits.

With so much time at its disposal, it can give a real sense of the pace at which things happened in Austen's world and it can give more screen time to peripheral figures, like the Westons and John Knightley and his family. As a result, we feel Highbury is a fully functioning community, with a life of its own: not just a backdrop to Emma's own particular concerns. I also liked the way the prologue was used to set up the story and avoid long expository dialogue scenes later on.

But it also has its deficiencies.

Austen is probably best-loved for her romances, but in Emma the romance is somewhat peripheral and only really emerges in the closing chapters. This production tries to make it much more prominent, but can only do this by subtly distorting the method of the book. Rather than seeing events largely through Emma's eyes, so we share in her constant misapprehensions about what is really going on, we get a much more objective viewpoint. For example, we know about Knightley's growing attachment to Emma long before she does - but this weakens the impact of the proposal scene.

Emma may not be especially romantic, but it is funny. In switching the focus of the story, humour is the biggest casualty. Whatever other purposes they serve, Mr Woodhouse, Miss Bates, Harriet Smith and Mrs Elton are comic figures and Austen has furnished each of them with devastatingly accurate and revealing dialogue. Perversely, this production edits out most of the lines that actually help define these characters. Not only do we lose some of the humour, but the story itself suffers slightly.

This Mr Woodhouse is not quite Austen's silly, timorous, self-centred old hypochondriac. He has too much substance, seems too intelligent and his fears are too reasonably grounded in his his distress at the death of his wife.

Miss Bates is a good-natured, grateful old spinster, but her most striking characteristic is her constant, nervous prattling. She cannot help giving voice to every stray thought that passes through her head. Austen supplies paragraph after paragraph of her irksome, stream-of-consciousness, babbling (probably too much) but hardly any of it appears here. This means that Emma's impatience with her is no longer justified and her unkind quip at Box Hill loses its point and poignancy.

Harriet Smith is sweet, innocent and easily led, but decidedly dim. Here she is not quite dim enough. The scenes where she is struggling with Mr Elton's puzzle and where she disposes of her little box of 'treasures' are both rather thrown away so she appears fractionally less stupid and childlike than she should. This slightly diminishes our sense of Emma's culpability in her delusions and her bad decisions.

Mrs Elton suffers even more. We see very little of her vulgar pretension, her her continual bragging about Maple Grove, her bossiness, her officious interference in Jane Fairfax's affairs and her determination to be Queen Bee of the neighbourhood.

In every case, I feel the problems are not with the actors (although Michael Gambon was miscast) but in the way the characters are conceived and I suspect that there is an underlying reason for this: the screenwriter and director were both uncomfortable with certain aspects of the book and wanted soften its edges to make it more palatable to a modern audience.

They thought Mr Woodhouse was too much a figure of fun and wanted the audience to understand him, rather than laugh at him. They feared Austen was too merciless in her depiction of Miss Bates's verbal diarrhoea, so toned it down (to vanishing point). They felt she was too patronising to Harriet Smith so made her slightly more spirited and independent. Above all, they were worried that Austen was too much implicated in Emma's own snobbery in the way she depicted the 'parvenu' Mrs Elton so let the character recede into the background.

The result is that the story occasionally loses focus and some of the key scenes dissipate their energy and dribble away. Superficially, this Emma looks like one of the most faithful and complete adaptations of Austen, but for me there is always this canker of unease eating away at it from within.

Perhaps they should have adapted the book more freely (it's only a novel: not a sacred text). Patricia Rozema registered her concern with Mansfield Park by completely re-inventing Fanny Price and re-writing the story. I might prefer the earlier, more faithful, BBC adaptation but Rozema's radically different version is valid in its own right. You can try to faithfully reproduce the spirit of a book or you can comment on it. Both approaches are legitimate.

This Emma is neither one thing nor the other.

score 6/10

keith-moyes 27 October 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2147973/