Emma. (2020)

Emma. (the punctuation is included in the title) is a film version of Jane Austen's novel Emma. Now, we had another one of these directed by Douglas McGrath in 1996 starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam and a host of other actors, and one wonders why this film was made at all since it hasn't been so long. (Then again, Greta Gerwig just remade Little Women, and the most recent adaptation of that novel was in 1994.) And, of course, there is Amy Heckerling's Clueless, which this film markedly resembles in its color scheme.

Bill Nighy, I must admit, made me laugh many times. If only he were onscreen more! There is also a constant focus on the servants in this film. They take up a lot of space, and this is both intriguing and distracting, undermining the action of the story and making it, at least momentarily, about something else. I liked this idea a lot – it reminded me a bit of the way Zhang Yimou undermines the Chinese martial arts melodrama in Curse of the Golden Flower. This film is a comedy, though, so the focus on servants is nearly always comic. And of course, one can't make Emma about the servants, because it's already a novel about class, and the heroine is a member of the upper classes whose "burden" it is to be kind and generous to those beneath her in caste. 

What is, perhaps, odd about this is I found this Emma to be not very likable. She's never the generous, kind, lovable person everyone says she is in the film's third act. In fact, I felt a kind of strange disconnect in this version of Emma when everyone is surprised by the heroine's selfish, shallow behavior in act three. It's weird because the entirety of the film is devoted to her selfish, shallow behavior, and she's played by Anya Taylor-Joy as though she is always working an angle, always plotting some new device. So it's hard to believe that anything she does is innocent. Now, I honestly thought (because of the director's focus on the servants) that this was intended as a critique of Emma herself, like a new version of Emma that was much harder on the heroine. But no. Emma. expects us to love this Emma as much as ever, and we expect the men to fall in love with her and the women to forgive her and love her and want her to love them back, and we are expected to want the best for her all around. But acts one and two do not help with this, and I chafed against the third act conversion I was supposed to experience.

I loved Josh O'Connor, and Bill Nighy. Both are very funny. And O'Connor has the film's most heartfelt scene – in a carriage as he confesses his love for Emma. (In this version of Emma I think she should have married Mr. Elton.) I also thought Mia Goth was quite good, Amber Anderson too. 

But... why does this film exist? The entire time I was watching it I was wondering why I wasn't watching Clueless instead.

Tai, you don't have time to change, but you could hit a few balls in those clothes.

She could be a farmer in those clothes.