(ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/05)

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 27 1996 (IPS) - Jane Austen may be more of a household name in Hollywood in recent days than Sylvester Stallone, but, as the new adaptation of her novel ‘Emma’ shows, that doesn’t mean that the quality of films is improving.

In fact, ‘Emma’, adapted and directed by Douglas McGrath, is the sort of movie that makes you long for a good explosion or two – preferably strong enough to wipe out the English country estates the movie’s makers so adore.

After a year that has seen movies made of ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’, and a BBC adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ audiences could be forgiven for wondering if film producers appreciate Austen’s work for her shrewd insights, or merely for the opportunity to film country houses.

The new version of ‘Emma’ (distributed in the United States by Miramax) focuses so much on attractive, sunny estates and so little on subtlety – most of the novel’s plot twists are spelled out for even the dimmest viewer – that one suspects the latter motive is at work.

The problem is that, although the resurgence of interest in Jane Austen’s ironic novels is comforting, the five filmed versions of Austen novels over the past years have not consistently understood or recaptured Austen’s wit.

In fact, the current, fairly literal adaptation of ‘Emma’ suffers in comparison to a tongue-in-cheek, updated version made last year by director Amy Heckerling and set in modern-day California, ‘Clueless’.

‘Clueless’ presented Alicia Silverstone as Cher, a modern-day version of the well-intentioned, but hopelessly naive, matchmaker that Austen first described. Silverstone’s Cher was everything that Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma, in the current version, is not: charming, convincingly sweet, and attached to her peers’ social norms without being snobbish.

The reason ‘Clueless’ succeeds and ‘Emma’ fails is that Heckerling is able to convey a world – modern-day U.S. high school life – as rich in dress codes, linguistic conventions and the obsessive desire to belong to a group as Austen’s milieux.

In so doing, Heckerling effortlessly updates Austen’s main strength: a knowing, but fond, look at the foibles and highly regimented world of a privileged elite.

But McGrath, an editor for the U.S. journal ‘The New Republic’, seems not to notice most of Austen’s wry commentary on the world of Emma Woodhouse. Instead, he takes the snobbery at face value, having characters constantly remind Emma that, because she is rich, she must set a good example.

The plot of ‘Emma’ still revolves around the heroine’s failure to comprehend love or maturity – and thus to solve her friend’s problems, rather than merely to complicate them. Yet without Austen’s wry asides, Emma comes across as a silly, meddlesome snob, whom audiences are supposed to love only because she is pretty and has an English accent.

It doesn’t help that U.S. actress Paltrow speaks in a ludicrously wrong accent, sounding more like a yuppie prig in Margaret Thatcher’s London than a Regency lady. Nor is the rest of the cast, including Jeremy Northam as the sarcastic Mr Knightley and Toni Collette as Emma’s friend Harriet, much better.

Filmmakers like McGrath seem to like Austen because she represents culture, but don’t trust audiences enough to appreciate her without having everything explained to them. Thus Knightley has to all but announce his love for Emma, as does the odious Mr Elton (Alan Cumming), ruining Austen’s quieter approach.

Similarly, the film’s idea of wit is to have Emma show anger by missing the bull’s-eye repeatedly while playing with a bow and arrow, and nearly hitting nearby dogs – prompting Knightley to say, with a typical smirk, “Try not to kill my dogs.”

The BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was little better, with unusually passionate characters evoking an ardour that Austen’s repressed narratives shunned. Except for the modern touch of ‘Clueless’ and Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s graceful adaptation of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ last year, the Austen resurgence has left a mostly pallid collection of films.

Perhaps, to recapture Austen’s world effectively in modern times, you either have to observe high school kids, as Heckerling did, or to have a keen eye for the importance of social codes, as Lee has shown in his Taiwanese films as well as ‘Sense and Sensibility’. McGrath simply tries to revisit a bygone era, and ends up with a boring, trivial film.