Reviewing Jane: I Do Suspect That She Is Not Really Necessary To My Happiness

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 1996

Director: Douglas McGrath

Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Toni Collette, Alan Cumming

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute

MPAA Rating: PG

The last novel published during Jane Austen's lifetime was Emma, and it is respected by many critics as her best work. The book presents a flawed heroine making constant mistakes in judgment until she finally improves herself enough to stumble ass-backwards into a relationship she miraculously hasn't managed to ruin. It's a fun, flirty story and it makes perfect sense why high school movie dynamo Amy Heckerling decided to update it into a little movie called Clueless (more on that later) in 1995.

What makes less sense is why the powers that be decided that the world deserved another adaptation of Emma just a year later, but considering that it's the most prominent straight adaptation of the source material, why not start with this one?

Pictured: Toni Collette looking at the call sheet and realizing that she's not gonna get to meet Alicia Silverstone.

So, the plot of Emma. Gosh, this section really does feel futile when we're talking about centuries-old, world renowned literature, dunnit? We'll go fast, don't worry. Emma Woodhouse (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a rich young woman with no designs to marry but plenty of designs to matchmake her friend Harriet Smith (Toni Collette) into relationships with men who are entirely too good for her, including the local revered Mr. Elton (Alan Cumming) and the son-in-law of her former governess Frank Churchill (Ewan McGregor).

All the while, she is endlessly harangued by her moralizing brother-in-law Mr. Knightley (Jeremy Northam), and of course they fall in love because that's just how gender politics worked in the Regency era.

Pictured: Romance!

When you're adapting Jane Austen, there is pretty much one of three ways you can go about it. The first is the Clueless route, translating the novel into a modern story. The second is to highlight the period-based character comedy that Austen always wove into her stories, much like the 1940 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The third is to completely ignore that essential aspect of Austen's work, assuming that because it's old it must be "important," and presenting it with po-faced seriousness.

To be fair, Emma does indulge in a little bit of the second, but if we're going to stick this in a category, it's the latter all the way. Here we're treated to two hours of stuffy, bone-dry material posturing as British and genteel even though its director and lead are American. The acting, at least from the non-leads, is very Masterpiece Theater, but not even at the level of Northanger Abbey, which actually was a Masterpiece production, because that movie at least hired actually talented, actually British people.

Although, I must say, Gwyneth Paltrow at least isn't bad here. I'm not here to defend any American's fake British accent, but I drew great delight her two-faced approach to the townspeople she deems beneath her - which is compounded by an internal monologue that didn't appear quite enough for me to remember that this was a thing the movie was doing and thus was tremendously confusing, but still funny.

And as much as nobody here seems aware that Jane Austen is a comedy writer, there are genuinely funny moments that sneak through from time to time. A montage of Emma trying not to think about Mr. Knightley is actually funny and cinematically engaging, the only time both of those elements combine in the film, which generally has very little use for either of them.

It's mostly just lifestyle porn destined for a future Pinterest board.

Unfortunately, for the most part, Emma can't help but be that dreaded word: boring. The film is also inept in a few major ways that prevent it from accomplishing anything more. First, the staging is completely bananas, shoehorning random activities into every dialogue scene, staging moments while people do things like set up for a barn dance, shoot arrows, or pick strawberries. It should feel nice to get some fresh air away from the drawing-room bound drama that Austen usually works with, but the sheer abundance of random hustle and bustle is intensely distracting.

But even more distracting is the fact that this movie just isn't shot very well. The lighting designer seems to have a blind spot, that blind spot being the entire foreground. The second any character steps toward the camera, a shadow falls over them like an alien craft is passing overhead. And the lighting in Emma's mansion is even more whack, sending rectangles of light shooting off in random directions to highlight exactly the objects in the room that aren't key to understanding the scene.

It's bad, people. I don't know who let this happen on such a major Hollywood scale, but they shouldn't be allowed near human eyes. But that's the only thing in the movie that's legitimately, actively terrible. Everything else is just bland and unremarkable. The best that I can say about Emma is that it's true to the source material, but beyond that it has absolutely nothing to offer. It's like listening to an audiobook starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and if you're into that that's totally fine. It's just not really adding anything to the world of Jane Austen, so it's a good one to skip if you're not as inclined to be thorough as I am.

TL;DR: Emma is a perfectly fine literary adaptation, but one just wishes it didn't take itself quite so seriously.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 944
Other Films Based on Emma
Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Emma (McGrath, 1996)
Emma (Lawrence, 1996)
Aisha (Ojha, 2010)
Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)

The Summer Of Our Discontent

Year: 2013

Director: John Wells

Cast: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute

MPAA Rating: R

Typically, when adapting a play for the silver screen, a director will take advantage of the action not being required by theatrical necessity to take place in mainly just one room by either expanding the setting or utilizing filmic tricks to expand the narrative universe. 

In the 1986 musical adaptation Little Shop of Horrors, Frank Oz keeps the location consistent but uses various imaginative flourishes like fantasy sequences to keep the film alive and makes great use of inherently cinematic close-ups to show details of the story a theatrical audience wouldn't be able to get.

On film, Noises Off... becomes a cross-country journey of madcap proportions and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead explores every intimate corner of Hamlet's universe.

In August: Osage County, based on the play of the same name by Tracy Letts, director John Wells makes the executive decision to do absolutely nothing. One gets the sense that what we see onscreen is the play as directly transcribed by a particularly dutiful screenwriter (who upon closer inspection turns out to be Tracy Letts himself, so maybe not so dutiful). 

As a man whose directorial credits up til now have only included 9 episodes of ER and one feature film three years ago, perhaps it was wise not to tool around with the script too much and to let the actors speak for themselves. With a powerhouse cast like this, this isn't a sin but the film itself feels as musty and dim as the house it takes place in.

But Meryl Streep.

This meandering family drama isn't so much a narrative as it is a showcase for today's brightest Hollywood talent. Everybody gets a chance to let their gray hair show and strip themselves of their star personas to bare their souls onscreen. This is the primary gift of August: Osage County, and it's not one to spit upon.

Meryl Streep stars as Violet Westin, the pill-popping cancer-ridden matriarch of a royally screwed up family. When her husband, the alcoholic poet Beverly (Sam Shepard), commits suicide, the extended family gathers for the funeral.

The visitors include Violet's sister Mattie Fae Aiken (Margo Martindale), her irritable husband Charlie (Chris Cooper), and their son Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch). Little Charles has a secret (something not uncommon to this family) - he's in love with the beautiful Ivy (Julianne Nicholson). Their relationship gives him a great deal of happiness, but the only problem is that she happens to be his cousin.

As Ivy tries to hide her incestuous tryst, so does her sister Barbara (Julia Roberts) try to hide her crumbling marriage with her unfaithful husband Bill (Ewan McGregor). And Barbara's daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin) tries to hide the fact that all she really wants to do is smoke pot with her Aunt Karen (Juliette Lewis)'s new boyfriend Steve (Dermot Mulroney), a sketchy gentleman at the best of times.

Basically the kissing' cousins have the most stable relationship in the entire film.

The cast does a uniformly terrific job bringing their characters to life (Cumberbatch, Nicholson, and Margo Martindale especially, although Meryl Streep's performance is of course unmatched), and in fact most if not all problems with August: Osage County are at the script level, if only because everything else resolutely refuses to get up to anything remotely interesting.

In fact, the few occasions where the other filmic elements peek up their tender heads, they seem to be actively conspiring against the performances. A key emotional point that is central to Meryl Streep's drug-addled breakdown is overtaken by shrieking sound design, an element that hadn't come into play before and wouldn't again, as if being punished for interjecting.

As the Westin family grapples with their manifold personal issues, tensions bubble and rise to a boil at a massive dinner table scene that probably lasted for an entire act in the original play. It is a monumental achievement in extended scene editing and provides a fantastic stopping off point, bringing all the interpersonal conflicts to a climax and exploding in a firework display-worthy exhibition of film performance.

Unfortunately the story has the tenacity to continue for a good 30 minutes beyond this point. The plot meanders, tossed like a beach ball between minor characters, of which there are too many too keep track of and fully flesh out. The film overextends itself in trying to showcase as many actors as possible and results in the sidelining of even the most important characters (Meryl Streep - duh - and Julia Roberts) for up to ten minutes at a time.

Pictured here deep in discussion about topics that really should have had more screentime than Abigail Breslin getting high.

It can't really juggle everything adequately and as such loses anything like a "theme" or a "conclusion," both of which are privileges reserved for more coherent stories. The story doesn't end so much as it peters out, but at least the final act has one solid scene - a confrontation between Violet, Barbara, and Ivy where the three women duke it out in a rampage of acting that culminates in my favorite line ever: "EAT THE FISH, BITCH!"

So the film definitely isn't a waste of time, but all the dramatics fade to vapor when the script turns up the heat and finds that it never really had anything to say in the first place. Definitely one to catch if you're in the mood to watch underused older Hollywood women eat it up, but it is a decidedly uneven piece of narrative cinema.

TL;DR: August: Osage County is a powder keg of great performers, but falls beneath the weight of a clunky script.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 963