osprey_archer | Emma, again

I would have liked Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma better had I not first seen the new Emma miniseries with Romola Garai, which is practically perfect in every way.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma is not a miniseries, but a movie. With the possible exception of Northanger Abbey, there's simply too much going on in Austen's novels to effectively reduce them down to two hours. The Box Hill sequence is a good example: while the filmmakers kept the absolutely essential exchange about Emma's unkindness to Miss Bates, they dropped the rest of the scene - even though it's also one of the lynchpins in the Jane Fairfax/Frank Churchill relationship.

In fact, Jane Fairfax's storyline got shortchanged all around. I don't mind so much that we didn't have to suffer Mrs. Elton interminable attempts to find Jane a good governessing position against her will, but her entire storyline with Frank gets truncated - and Frank himself is reduced from a charming, high-spirited jerk to a total jackass. In the book, he runs with the suggestion when Emma speculates that perhaps Jane and Mr. Dixon had a liaison, which is bad enough; but in the movie, he makes the suggestion himself.

And he doesn't merely suggest it as speculation: he strongly implies that it's true. What sort of man goes around spreading false and scurrilous stories about his secret lover? Is he trying to ensure that she can't break their secret engagement and leave him, by soiling her reputation so that no one will marry or hire her?

Also, he's dressed like Willy Wonka. He has the purple coat and the reddish Gene Wilder hair - who thought that was a good combination for a romantic lead? And while I'm being shallow, I thought Harriet was woefully miscast: she needs to have a fluffy, girlish prettiness, and the actress playing her simply looked too old for the part. /shallow

But despite cutting Jane Fairfax & Frank Churchill's romance to the quick, the filmmakers still couldn't find time to properly expand on Emma's character. She's a difficult, contradictory character: clever, pretty, witty and charming, and slightly stuck-up because everyone has always told her so; yet quite lacking in common sense, and therefore quite ridiculous when she makes silly mistakes; capable of quicksilver cruelty, but also of great kindness and tact.

It takes a good actress and a clever script to capture the many facets of Emma's character. Gwyneth Paltrow never gets a chance to show us whether she's up to the task, though, because the script doesn't even try. Instead it plays up Emma's ridiculousness, reducing her from a flawed heroine to a silly, flighty girl: a good match for Mr. Knightly not because they share a similar quality of mind, but because she needs a firm and fatherly hand to direct her life.

Reducing, reducing, reducing: all my complaints about the movie come back, ultimately, to the main complaint that the movie is too short to contain the book, and tries to overcome this defect by simplifying the characters. The movie is charming, in its way, but it's much, much less than the book.