In this delightfully delicious new film adaptation from Director Autumn de Wilde, Jane Austen happy endings are reimagined all over again. Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy, The Witch) portrays the busybody heroine with a punctuated ‘period’ at the end of the film’s title, as if to say ‘period. End of sentence.’ Or, ‘Period. The final word.’ Or, perhaps, ‘Period. What you see is what you get…’
And what you get is nearly twenty-one-year-old Emma in a world with “very little to distress or vex her.” Life is an English garden and greenhouse of the finest roses and heather amidst her tea and biscuit society. But a bored Emma spends most of her time frolicking in delightful gossip for the women of Yorkshire. If this were 2020 we’d call her a Mean Girl (the Tina Fey film), but instead this is English 19th century in the fictional country village of Highbury and the surrounding estates.
A comedy of manners, Emma tackles – with little seasoned experience – marriage, sex, age and social status. Matchmaking is her forte but she’s far from likable and even further from finding her own husband. But when strategizing the marriage of Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) to Mr. Elton (Josh O’Connor), it seems she might have his intent all wrong. And, when the lovely Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson) arrives on the scene, Emma might finally have met her match. And then, too, there’s Mr. Churchill (Callum Turner) and well, what’s a girl to do?
Spoiled, headstrong and self-satisfied, one could blame it all on the fact that Emma’s mother died when she was very small, so she’s been a ‘daddy’s girl’ to the highly forgiving Bill Nighy in the role of Mr. Woodhouse. Ah, but alas, there’s Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn) a neighbor and friend who longs to see Emma in love, with her wide-set eyes, the close up shots of the camera, her brat-like demeanor, all making Taylor-Joy seem more like the original Reality Housewife.
Emma is the hardest to like of all the Jane Austen characters. One can fondly recall Elinor Dashwood or Elizabeth Bennett in Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice, but like the recent Greta Gerwig hit Little Women, every generation has its version. This one steps in where the 1990s Douglas McGrath directed version – starring Gwenyth Paltrow – left off, with much more flare and far more scheming. Three and a half tiaras