This must be one of the worst adaptations in costume drama history.

kboddaerd

Well, what to say about it? Is it actually worth the name adaptation? It depends what standards one has.

Granted, the costumes are great and colourful, the sets are equally splendid, the opening credits very nice, the music beautiful and the BBC might get a few prizes for that like for their Jane Eyre-adaptation in 2006, but for the rest there is little adaptation discernible.

All the wordy Austen-language has been taken out along with it all its subtle playfulness, which is the greatest thing about Austen. Her two main characters tend to 'play' with each other in speech, like Lizzy and Darcy did in Pride and Prefudice 1995 and Emma and Knightley (Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong) did in 1996 despite their severe lack of time. Here though, there is no subtlety going on at all. Characters scream and shout at each other and run after one another without seeming restraint. It is as if watching a modern drama in older costumes.

Characters furthermore speak in too modern vocabulary, are dropping their Ts, speak in an accent not remotely similar to an upper class accent, wave at each other in the street, do not bow or courtesy, open their own doors, toss their own logs on the fire, let the children fight in the street, ask for the salt to fellow table guests, let the children eat dinner with them in the dining room and more of that adamant nonsense.

As if that was not enough, Emma seems to have been toned down to a light story of two people who are right for each other but do not seem to get it yet. In fact, the original does not do that, so the adaptation has even less business to put that in.

The only remotely well played and well written character must be Miss Bates (Tamsin Greig) and she is a character that is only a small part of the whole Highbury-world. She is at least as good as Prunella Scales in the role (1996) and the Miramax-take on the character. On the other hand the rest of the original characters is either badly drawn or too much exaggerated: Emma (Romola Garai) looks too immature and too unreserved to be Emma, mistress of Hartfield and rich single lady; Mr Knightley (Johnny Lee Miller) looks too young to be Emma's 18-year senior and tends to be too much of a 'man' instead of a 'father' like his original - The Independent said about him that he was in danger of becoming Emma's subject rather than being overlooked – indeed, he has no authority to the viewer either; Mr Woodhouse (Michael Gambon) does his best, but is saddled with a very repetitive, sad and small script - Constanduros (1972) and Davies (1996) made much more of him -; Mr Elton is slimy, but up to the point of impertinence and rudeness; the Knightley-children are behaving as badly as children nowadays; Harriet Smith (Louise Dylan) does not know how to eat soup; Jane Fairfax (Laura Pyper), Frank Churchill (Rupert Evans) and Emma herself have been bound together in a mysterious way - what the mysterious way is, is probably that they were born at about the same time… At any rate, the mysterious way is never explained.

The very important subplot of Churchill and Jane Fairfax is nearly wiped out apart from its conclusion and Sandy Welch managed to turn Austen's lovely and charming Churchill into the least desirable man in England. After Box Hill, one wonders how Jane actually still wants him.

Emma and Knightley are also an enigma. As Emma is so immature, one is at a loss what Knightley sees in her. At some point he professes that 'until Mrs Knightley is in existence, he will manage household-matters by himself'. That can be true, but with an immature wife he will end up doing them for eternity.

The BBC claimed that they 'took Jane Austen off the literary shelf and made her part of our lives again'… They have certainly taken her off the literary shelf, that is a fact. I do not know what they meant by 'making her part of our lives again'. I guess neither the writer (Sandy Welch), nor the controller of BBC Drama, nor the director, nor the producer have ever seen the literary shelf which might account for the stupid comment Emma makes about Mitlon: 'I've managed two pages of Milton.' Austen is not stuffy, it is fun and it can be poetic too. Only not, of course, if one does not know how.

A lot has been said about miscasts in Romola Garai and Johnny Lee Miller. Austen is not about looks, it is about writing alone. She never describes her characters and as such, miscasts in Austen do not exist. This drama was a shambles because Sandy Welch misunderstood Frank Churchill (he that gets the readers to know the people in Highbury), Regency society and Austen's set-up to a great extent. Sugary drama without foundation, that even extended to Mr Woodhouse (the most hilarious character of the work) was the result. Despite the beautiful scenery, the sparkling charm of this work was lost in the mists of desperate modernisation.

score 4/10

kboddaerd 27 October 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2147986/