Versions of Emma . . .

For me, Emma is the novel in which Jane Austen comes closest to George Eliot.  Like Middlemarch, Emma has an impercipient heroine who wishes to do good and who, in the effort do good, makes mistakes that force her to re-evaluate her sense of what the good entails.  Emma is much less given to introspection than Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, and the lessons that experience teaches her are therefore perhaps less painful and certainly less likely, given Emma's wealth and status, to affect her place in the social world, but they are serious nonetheless.  She is the only Austen heroine that one can accuse of cruelty herself and of being blind to the cruelty of another.  Blinded to some extent by rank and wealth, she is also perhaps the only Austen heroine to be blinded too by a jealousy that she is incapable of articulating or acknowledging.  So Emma is a sobering novel, and all the more sobering because the protagonist is active and intelligent, and not at all like the more passively suffering, morally sensitive Fanny Price of Mansfield Park.  We certainly sense that harm might be done to Fanny -- but with Emma, there's the active doing of harm that's all the more dangerous because it goes unrecognized for so long.  The harm she does isn't just a matter of trying to make inappropriate matches for her protege Harriet Smith, the young woman whom she encourages to think it likely that men of a very different class might marry her -- although trying to run people's lives is bad enough.  Worse, though, is her abetting of Frank Churchill's disparagement of Jane Fairfax, a young woman of no family (as Emma might say) but one  who is clearly Emma's equal in beauty and her superior in musical talent.

The situation. readers will remember, is as follows:  Frank Churchill is engaged to Jane but cannot make the engagement public for fear that his aunt, who brought him up and whose name he took, might disinherit him for a connection with a woman she believes to be beneath him.  Jane is an orphan whose only relations are the poor Bateses.  In Highbury, the village where the novel is set, Emma, her father, and their neighbor at Donwell Abbey, Mr Knightley, are very much at the top of the social tree.  They are not "titled" aristocracy, but in their small world they are the de facto aristocrats, the setters of the standards of taste and manners, who expect, and receive, the respect of the neighborhood.  When Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are in Highbury at the same time, Frank's strategy for concealing their engagement is to pay a lot of attention to Emma and, in doing so, to constantly disparage Jane, usually by making or implying comparisons with Emma, tacitly inviting her to believe herself superior to Jane in the ways that matter to Frank.  His attention to Emma is public; his disparagement of Jane occurs in private conversation with Emma, who does not seriously try to reprove Frank for it.  Indeed, she's flattered by it, and all the more so since Jane's relative, Miss Bates, has constantly irritated Emma by talking about Jane's beauty and accomplishments.  So there's a worm of jealousy that Frank's flattery of Emma and disparagement of Jane feeds, and I think we have to understand the climactic scene of the narrative -- where Emma publicly insults Miss Bates by making a joke about her being boring and dull -- as connected both to her irritation with Miss Bates's focus on Jane's qualities and to her sense, that Frank has encouraged, that Jane isn't really all that special.  Mr Knightley is present at the scene of insult, and he tries to mute the pain of it for Miss Bates, but later, in private conversation, he reproaches Emma severely for her behavior.  He doesn't know, of course, the full extent of Emma's abetting of Frank's disparagement of Jane.  If he did, he would, we can imagine, be even more blunt in his condemnation of Emma's behavior.  He sees Frank only as a lightweight who doesn't know his duties to his father -- but Emma has experience of his  conduct that extends beyond that and in which she is complicit -- something that she at no point admits to Knightley, even after her own conduct improves.  In Middlemarch, Dorothea's moral growth comes with self-analysis and self-reproach.  Emma, less introspective, requires some help from the outside, so to speak, and that's what Knightley provides.  He has long loved Emma, but he doesn't declare that love until Emma has shown due awareness of the harm she has done and is sorry for it.

Any filmed version of Emma should try to do justice to its core of moral seriousness.  I haven't (yet!) seen every filmed version, but I've seen the most recent three.  Two are "stand-alone" movies from 1996, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Beckinsale respectively in the title role.  The most recent is a 2009 BBC series, with Romola Garai  as Emma.  All will give pleasure, but I don't think that all work equally well.  The two movies time out at 107 minutes (Beckinsale) and 120 minutes(Paltrow), while the series, originally in four episodes, comes in at just under four hours -- in effect, twice as long as the others.  From my point of view, as someone looking for a version that does justice to the novel, the series has a considerable advantage -- the details of the plot are clearer, relationships are well-established, and we live with the characters long enough to more fully understand them and the changes they undergo.  A viewer who has not read the novel might well not be bothered by what sometimes seems to me a hasty treatment of some of the developments, and that's fine.  And in this case, there is much that I do like about the series -- but its effectiveness for me is compromised by the director Jim O'Hanlon's conception of Emma herself.  I don't think it's the fault of Romola Garai [pictured below, as Emma], who did excellent work in the BBC serialization of Daniel Deronda (she was Gwendolyn Harleth) and in the newsroom thriller series The Hour.  In what follows, I'll discuss what struck me as the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three versions.

1.  BBC series (2009). 
There are two great strengths to this version.  One is the scene-stealing performance by Michael Gambon as Mr Woodhouse, Emma's widowed, valetudinarian father, who is almost paralyzed by his fears for his own health and those of people he cares about (so he's not totally self-centered).  It's a one-dimensional role, but Gambon is so alive and droll and charming that it doesn't pall.  (I once saw Gambon on stage as Eddie Carbone in Miller's A View from the Bridge, very credible and scary, despite some slippage of the Brooklyn accent, and as far as could be from Mr Woodhouse.)  Of the three Mr Woodhouses I'm considering here, he's the one for whom Emma's love and concern are most credible, and that's thanks to Gambon.  More important, though, is the other strength -- the length of the series enables us to more fully appreciate the insensitivity that approaches cruelty in Frank Churchill's treatment of Jane Fairfax.  In having to disguise his engagement to Jane, Frank's strategy, as I explained above, is to treat her disparagingly  while showing a decided and quite public interest in Emma herself.  Emma, to her discredit, goes along with this disparagement and seems even to enjoy it, though it's obvious that Jane is at least her equal in beauty and her superior in musical talent, even if she is a penniless orphan.  Already resentful of Miss Bates's attention to Jane, Emma is completely snowed by Frank's deceit, and for a long time she even fancies herself in love with him.  The two actors playing Jane and Frank, Laura Pyper and Rupert Evans -- names unknown to me until now -- are very effective, and Pyper especially makes Jane's suffering convincing.  I think it's critical to our estimation of Emma and to our understanding of the moral force of the narrative to see as much as we do of the Frank-Jane relationship and its complications.  What's galling about Frank, though Emma never seems to notice the impropriety of it, is Frank's obvious enjoyment of this game of disparagement. That's because Frank is witty and charming and draws Emma into enjoying it too.

My reservations about the conception of Emma herself in this version might be put this way:  Emma is too like Harriett Smith, the protege whose romantic life Emma undertakes to manage.  Harriet (Louise Dylan) is a pretty, good-hearted, not-very-bright girl, and her limitations are indicated by the readiness with which she accedes to Emma's ideas about her marital prospects.  But Emma herself should not appear to be so silly -- she should (and in the novel does) understand that she is seeking to move Harriet into a higher social class and that doing so might prove painful to Harriet.  But in this version Emma comes across as a rather empty-headed giggly "fixer" whose main difference from Harriet is the fact that she, Emma, has rank and money and the power that goes with them.  In the novel,  Mr Knightley's attraction to Emma derives in part from his perception of her her intelligence, a quality she undervalues or fails to acknowledge in herself, and  it's important that in a filmed version this intelligence be somehow made manifest.  In this version, however, Emma's matchmaking comes across not as a misuse of intellect but as mere meddling. Consequently, the scenes of Emma's dawning moral awareness lack the force that they could have.

One curious feature of this version is the opening, with its "backstories" that explain how Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax came to be isolated from their respective families as children.  I'm not sure how this is supposed to work, unless to suggest that Frank's bad behavior later is to be explained as a response to the childhood trauma, for Frank has always known the identity of his father.  That father is Mr Weston, a neighbor of Emma and her father, who in the opening of the novel (and the other filmed versions) marries Anne Taylor, Emma's governess-companion.  When a young widower and in difficult financial straits, he had given Frank up to be cared for by his sister-in-law, who insisted on the change of name to Churchill and who brought Frank up in very comfortable circumstances.  Are we meant to see Frank's bad behavior as somehow intended to punish, by embarrassing, his father for "abandoning" him?

The rest of the cast is just fine, although there are more vivid performances of some of the supporting characters in the other versions.  Mr Knightley is played by Jonny Lee Miller, very much against his Trainspotting type.  He's effective enough, though perhaps not credibly sixteen years older than Emma -- Miller is in fact nine years older than Garai, who was in her mid-twenties when this Emma was filmed.  Jodhi May, as Miss Taylor, is arguably too young for the role.  In Daniel Deronda, where she appears again with Romola Garai, she is Garai's romantic rival.  I think that she should be at least as old as Mr Knightley -- 38 in the novel -- but still younger than Mr Weston, whose wife she becomes.  Of the others, Tamsin Grieg is a very effective Miss Bates, and Christina Cole a Mrs Elton that you love to despise -- even as perhaps you uncomfortably realize that she is, in many ways, a lot like Emma in her belief in her organizational powers.

Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma (1996)

The conception of Emma in this film version is much closer to that of the novel and, to that extent, preferable to that of the BBC serial discussed above.  There is no doubt, either, that Emma is NOT just a giggly girl like her protege Harriet.  The Harriet here is Toni Collette, a very fine actress [pictured above, with Paltrow], and the contrast between the sharp Emma and the dim but good-natured Harriet is perfectly clear.  On the whole, Gwyneth Paltrow is a credible Emma -- she is not the most expressive of performers, a bit bland even, but then Emma is a character who sails through much of her young life untroubled by doubts about her motives or her machinations, and Paltrow's untroubled demeanor seems apt for much of the film.  The big scene where she doesn't quite rise to the occasion is that of Knightley's declaration of love, where Jeremy Northam's rendering of  Knightley's confusion and affection is credibly animated, while Paltrow doesn't seem able to find a matching animation in her own features.  Three other women in the cast give more vivid performances -- Toni Collette, already mentioned, as Harriett, Sophie Thomson as a painfully vulnerable Miss Bates, and the great Juliet Stevenson as a surprisingly knowing, witty, and even likable Mrs Elton.  There's also the accomplished Greta Scacchi as Mrs Weston, though her part, as written, doesn't give her enough to do.

As the list above suggests, there's an "all-star-cast" quality to this production, and it extends even to the score, by Rachel Portman.  That's not to say that all roles are equally convincingly taken.  The young Alan Cumming is too devoid of unctuous nastiness for Mr Elton, though he's always fun to see, and Ewan McGregor seems a bit uneasy as Frank Churchill.  As I've already suggested, though, the Frank-Jane part of the story, with its important moral relationship to Emma herself, is diminished in this and the other film version, presumably in order to keep the film at a length deemed appropriate for showing in cinemas.  Jeremy Northam is an effective, polished Knightley.  Denys Hawthorne is an effective Mr Woodhouse, though less vivid than Michael Gambon in the role, and Polly Walker is fine as Jane Fairfax, even as one wishes that the full extent of her humiliation by Frank, and Emma's complicity in it, could have been developed more fully.  The Frank-Jane story is much more than a sub-plot in the novel, for without a full treatment of it, we can't appreciate Emma's capacity for doing harm.  That whole dimension is underplayed in this film, and together with Gwyneth Paltrow's blandness at crucial moments, it leads this version to be less morally engaging and affecting than it could have been.

Kate Beckinsale as Emma (1996)

As with the Paltrow version, this almost contemporaneous film also fails to give full weight to the Frank Churchill-Jane Fairfax story, the importance of which is to show us Emma's complicity in Frank's cruelty.  In compensation, though, it does give us the most engaging accounts of Emma and of Mr Knightley, both given performances of great effectiveness.  Kate Beckinsale's face, in repose, has a severity that suggests a person not altogether at ease with herself.  She plays Emma as a character who could know that she is capable of using her intelligence and ingenuity to better effect than arranging the romantic lives of third parties in a small village.  She comes across as not totally happy with herself even before the moral problems attendant on her meddling begin to be clear.  It's fitting, then, that the Mr Knightley in this version, played by Mark Strong [pictured above with Beckinsale], is the severest and angriest Knightley of the three I'm considering, and to my mind the most effective.  His Knightley is a blunter, less suave, more intense character than Jeremy Northam's, and his critical interventions with Emma -- with respect to both her meddling with Harriet's life and her climactic public insulting of Miss Bates -- have great dramatic force, and their impact on Beckinsale's Emma is palpably conveyed.

The rest of the cast is solid or better.  Samantha Morton is as effective a Harriet as Toni Collette, and Prunella Scales -- yes, Sybil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers -- is a fine Miss Bates, older than the character in the other two versions and the more seemingly vulnerable for it.  Scales was in her mid-sixties when she played Miss Bates, thirty years older than Sophie Thomson and Tamsin Grieg in their respective versions.  Raymond Coulthard is a confidently assured young prig as Frank Churchill -- more at ease in the role than Ewan McGregor -- and Olivia Williams suggests a Jane Fairfax of considerable strength and dignity.

Some reviewers of this version saw it as an unusually "dark" film for an Austen adaptation.  One can see their point, but that should not be seen as a criticism: rather it should be seen as a tribute to the film-maker's perception of the novel's moral seriousness.  Austen is by no means always as "light and bright and sparkling" as she feared she was in Pride and Prejudice, and even in that novel, it's a mistake to see it as merely a frothy entertainment.  If you want darkness in Austen adaptations, there's also the splendid  and disturbing 2007 film of Mansfield Park, very strongly cast and directed by Patricia Rozema.

Epilogue:  "But what about Clueless . . . .?

"Light and bright and sparkling" would do very well to describe Amy Heckerling's 1995 film, Clueless, but it shouldn't be taken as a version of Emma.  The moral seriousness at the core of Austen's novel -- it's concern with impercipience that enables cruelty -- is totally excised.  Plot elements are certainly borrowed from Emma,  but the setting is moved to a California high school in an upscale neighborhood, and the Emma-like character, called Cher in the movie, is 16, where Emma is 21 or 22.  Certain stereotypes of American teenagers are added to the mix, and it's all played for laughs.  One of the big jokes on Cher is that her privileged self-confidence that derives from wealth blinds her to the fact that a boy she fancies, Christian (a parallel to Frank Churchill), is gay -- something that everyone else at her school seems to know.  Still, the writing, also by Heckerling, is excellent, a mix of literary and pop-cultural allusion, high-school slang, and verbal invention ("As if . . .!") that the cast carries off just perfectly.  Alicia Silverstone is the valley-girl incarnate, and if it's froth, the movie knows exactly what it's doing.  Stacey Dash and Brittany Murphy as Cher's sidekicks [above , with Silverstone] -- with Murphy in the Harriet role -- are perfect partners.  On it's own terms, the film works perfectly.