Cinema
Emma (U, selected cinemas)
The great neck show
Mark Steyn
Missed the last Jane Austen country wedding? Don't worry; there'll be another along in a minute. After Pride and Preju- dice, Sense and Sensibility, Dumb and Dumber — no, hang on, that's some other fellow's; I meant Persuasion — anyway, after three hits in the last year, Miss Austen is now back with Emma — or, if you prefer, Neck and Neckability. The neck in question belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow, and, in Douglas McGrath's adaptation, it's the star of the show, lovingly lingered on from every con- ceivable camera angle. It is, unquestion- ably, a great neck and a shoo-in at next year's Oscars for Best Neck in a Supporting Role. This is a neck you'd want to go neckin' with, an elegant curve of alabaster atop girlishly bony shoulders. But Miss Pal- trow's minders have still felt it necessary to take no chances and to surround her with actresses apparently selected principally on the grounds of their comparative neckless• ness. Sophie Thompson, so good as Anne Elliot's sister in Persuasion, is far too young for the part of Miss Bates, but neck-wise, she's no threat to Miss Paltrow; Toni Col- lette, last seen as the game gal in Muriel's Wedding, reduces Emma's friend Miss Smith to a beefy clod, but she doesn't get in the way of Miss Paltrow's neck. Every- one else looks goofy or lumpy or wedged into an awkward frock; even Greta Scacchi comes off badly, squeezed into a get-up that makes her look as if her nose is miss- ing. Emma is the story of a meddlesome matchmaker, and true, unlike its predeces- sors, it does have a title role. But a title role doesn't mean a star vehicle: after the sterling ensemble work of Sense and Senst- bility, there's something faintly depressing about a crack British supporting cast run- ning around trying to make a passing Hol-
lywood star look good. Miss Paltrow's accent isn't a problem, though she has a tendency to show off her enunciation as if she's reading aphorisms on a Radio Four literary quiz. Still, the accent is better than her dialogue, which is peppered with osten- tatious non-Austenisms like 'Good God!' And the dialogue is better than the look of the film, which misses the point entirely right from the opening's revival of that hoary old convention, ye olde worlde map with helpful labels for 'London' and 'High- bury', just like the Ronald Colman Prisoner of Zenda. McGrath's Emma looks like a period film — which is to say it doesn't conjure any particular time and place, only a generalised nostalgia.
Wherever we are, it certainly isn't Miss Austen's Highbury. Unlike the lumpy cast, the sets have been relentlessly smoothed out, culminating in a tasteful Christmas snowfall in the midst of which is tinkling 'Deck The Hall With Boughs Of Holly'. They're playing McGrath's song: he's decked the film with boughs not only of holly but of rosier-than-thou apples, glued to every available branch. In one shot of Miss Paltrow in a field, even the clusters of daisies seem choreographed. If the match- making plot sounds like a Regency Hello, Dolly!, then McGrath has preferred to treat it as Hello, Doily! Conversational two-shots are bathed in warm golden hues and filmed head on, so that for much of the time the movie feels like a series of particularly fruity table-mat prints. There are many approaches to Austen, but this one pretti- fies and anaesthetises: the shots are so posed, so symmetrical that they make the drama seem pinched and artificial. Both Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility created distant worlds far from our own and drew us into them so effectively we ceased to notice how remote they were. By contrast, every shot in Emma seems designed to keep the environment distracting us from the story. Last year's Clueless, which updat- ed the drama to Beverly Hills, was truer to the spirit of Austen. But Emma's worst flaws are more funda- mental. In the book, her eventual love for Mr Knightley comes as a genuine surprise to both her and her readers, a true convul- sion of the heart. In the film, it's tele- graphed from the first ten minutes, so that the inevitable conclusion seems inter- minably delayed. Jeremy Northam's Knightley is not the avuncular, middle-aged bachelor of the novel but something closer to an older brother's best pal, so obviously cooler than the dorks and dweebs filling out the rest of the crew, That said, the cli- max is still a disappointment. Gwyneth Pal- trow has beautiful cheekbones, but her Emma is a precocious child closer to Anne of Green Gables than Jane Austen. Hers is a bland performance, so evened out that her look of love for Knightley is identical to the patronising smile she doles out to the passing peasants. In its most crucial moments, this film is fake and unfelt.
Previous page
