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rachelreviewspopculture · 4 years

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Emma. (2020). Directed by Autumn de Wilde

Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. (2020) is unlike any Austen adaptation I’ve ever seen. It’s Austen by way of Wes Anderson.

Emma holds a special place in my heart as my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels, which, if my circle of friends and acquaintances is to be trusted as a decent sample of the population, does not seem to be a popular opinion in the least. Most favor the sparkle and wit of Pride and Prejudice or Anne Elliot’s deeply felt emotional life in Persuasion, but Austen famously wrote that she wanted to create a main character no one would like in Emma, and she seems to have succeeded. One picks up on Austen’s own attitude toward her heroine in the first line of the novel, in which she writes, “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich . . . had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” On the surface, this could appear as simply an accurate description of our main character (and it is), but if one knows Austen, one also knows there is always much more going on underneath the surface in her writing, and it takes some attention to see this. Here in the first line of the novel she is already making fun of poor Emma.

My appreciation of Austen’s sardonic side is not the only or even the main reason Emma is my favorite of her novels; it is rather the complexity of what Austen does in the novel and the seeming ease with which she accomplishes it. Like all who have genius, Austen makes it all look so effortless, which is one of the reasons her writing is often misinterpreted and misunderstood. When one looks past the surface of her novels, one sees that Austen explores foundational questions of human nature, which of course includes love and marriage, but also questions of being and appearance, and questions of family and community. It seems to me Austen has a particular interest in the question of paternity and authority, as father figures (or the lack thereof) all seem to bear special importance for her heroines.

In any case, in Emma, Austen weaves the novel around the self-important main character and two other supporting actors born in the town of Highbury the same year as Emma, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. These latter two are seen relatively sparingly in the novel and instead act as specters of what Emma’s life could have been; the three are connected not just by birth year, but by the early losses each has suffered. Frank, born to the affable Mr. Weston, loses his mother around three years old, and as a result his father ships him off to live with an aunt and uncle, thinking he cannot take care of his young son himself. Jane is an orphan whose only living family are her very poor grandmother and very tiring aunt, Mrs. and Miss Bates, and who, despite her accomplishments and beauty, seems destined to become a governess because of her lack of family and connections. Finally, there is Emma herself, whose mother died when Emma was young, and was raised with her sister by her father. All three children born to gentlemen from the same town, and yet all three with very different fates. Throughout the novel Austen demonstrates just how deeply these familial losses have affected our trio without ever commenting on the situation directly. Frank feels somewhat torn between his two families; Jane seems to be the loneliest creature alive; Emma is rather more obnoxious than she should be with a father who indulges her every whim, so long as she stay at home with him where he is sure that she will be safe. Of course the story is told through the drama of who is going to marry whom, but the story Austen tells in Emma is more deeply one of loss, community, and friendship.

There is so much more here than romance. In fact, there is always more to Austen’s novels than romance, a fact that escapes many of her readers and I think, most of her adapters. I of course have my own private ranking of the different on-screen adaptions (with Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005) coming at the bottom of that list), but all tend to be both romantic and Romantic in tone—not only focusing on the love stories of the main characters, but also filled with picturesque set pieces of the English country side, awash with dark and moody color palettes, and when the final profession of love does come, it comes in dramatic and breathy fashion. I enjoy a fantastical profession of love as much as the next girl, but I think Austen herself might laugh quite a bit at these adaptations (and in particular the professions of love included therein), as one of the things she constantly points out in her novels is that because human nature is quite flawed, language is often the means of confusion as much as it is clarity. We need a community around us in order to understand both ourselves and other people because our own vision is incomplete without others. But again, because human nature is messy, the coming together of a community can also be quite messy. Humans are a bit absurd, after all. Austen doesn’t miss this, but her on-screen adaptations mostly do.

Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. does not miss this at all. Brightly lit and pastel-colored, one knows immediately one is in for an Austen adaptation unlike any other. Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) is established immediately as simultaneously completely obnoxious—treating the servants poorly in her self-righteous manner—and sympathetic. The movie opens on the day of her long-time governess’s wedding, which not only will take Miss Taylor away from Emma’s day to day life, but also leave Emma the only person at home with her perpetually worried father, Mr. Woodhouse, here portrayed by Bill Nighy unlike I’ve ever seen before, not as fragile and eternally grieved, but as sprightly and absolutely absurd—terrified of drafts and ready to spring up from his seat at any moment to find and block their source.

This is the unexpected joy of de Wilde’s Emma. It picks up on and leans into Austen’s humor in ways I’ve never seen done before; I found myself laughing out loud at some of the blocking and visual jokes, and this led me to think about Austen’s novels and their adaptations in a new light. One of the reasons the Great Books can (and should) be read again and again is the almost infinite depth of these works, which leads to different aspects of the text shining through during different readings. Indeed, there is an almost Scriptural quality to great works of art, with something new coming to light each time one engages with them. Think of how we approach Shakespeare: his plays are infinitely fruitful, depending on the context in which one places the characters and the tone and emphasis given to each line. The plays stay the same and yet each rendition brings something new about reality to light. Couldn’t the same be said of Austen’s works?

De Wilde’s Emma. highlights humanity’s absurdity—and mines it for every bit of comedy it can—but also the loneliness we feel when our communities are broken. One of my favorite aspects of this adaption of Emma is its depiction of Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), the Woodhouses’s neighbor, and one of the only corrective influences in Emma’s life. Adaptations of Emma often show Knightley as more or less having his shit together from the beginning and not having much of an emotional journey to make other than figuring out at some point he is in love with Emma because of his jealousy of Frank Churchill. But Emma. picks up on Knightley’s somewhat lonely existence—he spends his days taking care of his very grand estate alone and in conversation with no one else. As Knightley walks through his magnificently decorated hallways, we see that much of the art is covered; he lives there, but does not enjoy what he has for he has no one with which to enjoy it. De Wilde’s Knightley is alone most of the time and somewhat awkward, and he too must make an emotional journey to understand that he is not after all content with his current state of affairs.

I wrote above that Emma. is Austen by way of Wes Anderson. There are aesthetic similarities: brightly lit shots filled with pastels, a coherent color palette for each character’s costuming, head-on and intimate blocking that makes one feel one is in the room with the characters rather than observing them from some Archimedean point. But the similarities run deeper than just aesthetic interpretation: Anderson’s films tend to concentrate on some sort of wounded family-unit beginning to acknowledge the wound and starting to heal by coming together despite the difficulties our messy natures present for us in attempting such a task. And the comedy Anderson finds in this does not come from making fun of his characters, but rather in showing the absurdity that arises out of our attempts to answer our desire for communion. Both the people we love and we ourselves have shortcomings and so the task of community and communion is bound to be a bit messy—and also very funny. Anderson never laughs at his characters, but always with them, in a deeply felt recognition of the human condition. De Wilde’s Emma. is very similar, and highlights this theme of the desire for community and all its frustrating and absurd consequences in a way never before brought to life in an Austen adaption. At first the unfamiliar tone took me off guard, and I wasn’t sure if de Wilde was taking license with Austen’s work. Upon further reflection, however, I see now that de Wilde is perhaps truer to Austen than any who have come before her, for she sees past the surface level romance, which most do not get beyond, and in her adaptation of Emma points to the great tragedy and comedy of being human.

#austen #jane austen #emma #emma2020 #autumn de wilde

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