Reviewing Jane: It's Such A Happiness When Good People Get Together

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2020

Director: Autumn de Wilde

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Bill Nighy

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

"Do we need another adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma?" cried the dozens of people who even heard this movie was coming out. Even though it's a title that hasn't really been dusted off this decade (even by the Austen-hungry Hallmark crew), I understand the perceived fatigue. The triple punch of adaptations that started with Amy Heckerling's Clueless, followed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Beckinsale's turns at bat, sprinted across screens in a span of just 16 months between 1995 and 1996. That's a whole lot of Emma.

But Autumn de Wilde's Emma. has come along anyway, to prove that the answer to that question is a vigorous yes.

I didn't even need the movie to prove this to me, because the Gwyneth and Kate adaptations SUCKED, so we've never had a straight period adaptation of the story that's remotely worthwhile. But I respect Autumn De Wilde's flex regardless.

If you missed the 90's, here's the gist of the plot. Handsome, rich, and spoiled Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) lives in luxurious solitude with her hypochondriac father (Bill Nighy). She strokes her ego by matchmaking her friends about town, and when a young rube of unknown birth named Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) she seizes upon the opportunity to make her into a fine young gentlewoman and foist her on any man that's around, blithely unaware that the men would generally rather eat dirt than marry her.

All throughout a variety of romantic misadventures that involve a revolving door of alabaster British character actors I can't be bothered to tell apart (sorry Callum Turner and Josh O'Connor), Emma is admonished by old family friend Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), the only person who ever seems to find fault with her. Naturally they fall in love.

Trust me when I say that her marrying someone who literally held her as a baby is one of the least creepy romantic matches in the Jane Austen universe.

I have a lot of very nice things to say about Emma. but I should probably start with what you can tell from the screenshots I've already used. This movie is gorgeous, darling. Every second of this film looks like a watercolor that could be hung in a museum, with luscious pastels smeared across every flat surface, outfits, and even the sky. It's like an Easter candle melted all over Regency England's tablecloth. It takes the fussy diorama sets of your run-of-the-mill Masterpiece adaptations and pushes them to the extreme, filling every corner of the frame with delicately piled pastries, colorful gewgaws, and the like.

Bear witness.

But all of this doesn't mean that Emma. is stiff and emotionally unavailable; far from it. The rigid grandeur of the sets serves as a vicious juxtaposition to the ridiculous antics of the rich fools contained within them. De Wilde and screenwriter Eleanor Catton have strung up a marvelous high wire act of tone here, delivering a sketch of messy humanity despite its extreme, almost cartoonish stylization. And in the process, they've captured Austen's tone better than any other period adaptation.  Her stories are emotionally resonant, sure, but the characters that populate them are daffy satirical caricatures of the upper classes.

These filmmakers get it, and I'm so thankful somebody finally has. They have stacked layers and layers upon the script here, bringing the novel to life perhaps even more than the novel itself was capable of. The first layer they start with is one I don't think I've ever seen in a period-set Austen adaptation: rich people fucking suck. They enforce a class system that limits the prospects of other people, just because they get to be at the top. They employ and ignore a veritable army of servants (this film, more than any other, depicts the sheer, overwhelming mass of staff required to make these people's lives possible). And they're used to getting everything they want, which is why it's so hard for Emma when the matches she tries to force keep falling through.

Starting in a place that acknowledges the fact that the characters (including the protagonist and her father) are grotesque and despicable allows for the film to mine the material for every ounce of acid-tongued, sour sarcasm it can produce. They aren't here to make Emma likable. That was the whole point of the novel: Austen set out to "take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," because it's way more interesting to watch a heroine overcome a massive flaw and earn her true love rather than some pure, milquetoast waif suffering until she's rewarded with a handsome prince.

Embracing the black comedy is a hugely important decision in making this Emma work, and it pays off in the form of the funniest straight Austen adaptation by a long shot. The actors are all game, especially Nighy, Taylor-Joy (whose clipped haughtiness is best displayed in a scene you can see in the trailer, where she opens the window of her carriage to a tiresome neighbor with a languorous flick of a finger), and Miranda Hart as the aforementioned tiresome neighbor. Hart could easily have been a one-note cartoon character, and she still would have been terrifically entertaining. But later she gets to deliver a scene of so much heartbreaking pathos that it provides the fuel for the emotional climax of the entire two hour film.

And now I finally have her name reinforced in my memory enough to stop calling her Friend from Spy!

Allowing the film to be funny and the characters to have foibles also does wonders in translating the humanity of these characters to modern day cinemagoers. These are not fossils locked in amber whose motivations and reactions can only be understood from a remove. They are messy, engaging, people who live and breathe and feel, whether they're frolicking around having fun with a pack of schoolgirls or wracked with weeping sobs over a year of terrible decisions. Even if you know nothing about the period, you know exactly what these people are feeling because they're allowed to be real.

This is well served by the film's choices about nudity and violence. Obviously it's very mild; they're not doing a gritty reboot here. But there are two scenes early on that display casual non-eroticized nudity and one scene involving a nosebleed in the climax that make the characters literally vulnerable. They're showing that underneath their endless layers of petticoats and gentility there still lies flesh, blood, and a beating heart.

One thing I especially love about the emotional capacity of this film is what it does with the character of Harriet. She's portrayed rightly as a suffering fool, but this is the first adaptation I've seen that fully allows her to be angry with Emma and the way she has toyed with her life like a bored cat. Even in the novel, Harriet's reaction to the final straw that severs their friendship is muted and elliptically delivered. But here, we get to sit in it and really dig into the chaos that Emma has sown among the people in her life. 

OK before I yammer on even more: Yes, everything in this movie is good and you should go see it as soon as you get the chance. Literally the only thing preventing me from embracing this as the best Austen I've ever seen is my overfamiliarity with the material. So allow me a couple years to sit on this and revisit, and we can reconvene during our Best of the 2020's conversation.

TL;DR: Emma. is a delightfully acerbic and beautiful adaptation that would do Jane Austen proud.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1309
Other Films Based on Emma
Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Emma (McGrath, 1996)
Emma (Lawrence, 1996)
Aisha (Ojha, 2010)
Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)

Teen Homicide (Don't Do It)

Year: 2018

Director: Cory Finley

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, Anton Yelchin

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When you bill a film as the second coming of Heathers, you know I'll be first in line. Unfortunately, you can bill a film as whatever the hell you want. The advertisers weren't lying. Thoroughbreds is a pitch black high school comedy about murder, after all. But we should all know by now not to violate the cardinal rule of reminding audiences of a movie much better than your own.

Come to think of it, you're reminding me of The Witch too. Stop it!

In Thoroughbreds, well-to-do teenager Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) is paid off by the mother of the only slightly less well-to-do Amanda (Olivia Cooke, who also held a starring role in Ready Player One, so this is a pretty big month for her) to host a tutoring session in the hopes that they'll become friends. This actually works, but probably not in the way mom was planning. It turns out that Amanda is an emotion-free sociopath, and Lily takes advantage of her total lack of conscience to plan a murder. 

She wants to take out a hit on her evil stepdad (evil is a malleable term here: we see him being generally disagreeable, but her perception of him is certainly skewed) Mark (Paul Sparks). They eventually draw in strung-out drug dealer Tim (Anton Yelchin, in what would seem to be his final role) to help with the plan.

He's the only one in the movie whose income is below like 10 figures.

Thoroughbreds is the writing and directorial debut of playwright Cory Finley, and it shows. It has all the limitations of setting and cast that a low budget debut would traditionally display, but it's also restricted to an absurdly small range of motion per scene, a pretty obvious holdover from the fact that this movie was originally written as a stage play. It's a static motion picture, and it never throws off the shackles of its theatrical origins. There's nothing wrong with a lot of scenes that are just two or three people talking to each other, but it's not presented with any particular cinematic flair. It's like eating a Pop Tart without any frosting. It's still a Pop Tart, but there's something so fundamental missing that it's not the same experience at all.

Now the script is pretty solid, of course. It's not as richly comedic as I was hoping, but there are certain dark situations and dialogue beats that raise a worthy chuckle. And the ideas it raises about emotion/the lack thereof in the teenage population, or how easy it is for wealthy people to toy with the poor are fun to chew on. 

It does tend to slip a bit too often into an over-literary mindset (this film is divided into chapters for absolutely no reason, other than to seem impressive and Smart), and the closing monologue leaves a lot to be desired - its attack on social media and technological advancements seems ripped from a completely different movie, because it has absolutely zero foundation in the story we've been watching. I don't think there's more than 90 seconds of actually even seeing a iPhone onscreen in the entire movie.

Look at these teens, so absorbed in their Chapsnats, not engaging with the real world, not going to Applebee's...

Everything in Thoroughbreds is kind of uneven in this way. Take the sound design, which sometimes creates incredible feats of audio, like the scene where the whirring of Mark's exercise machine keeps his stepdaughter awake. The noise builds and builds until she finally snaps, and you believe it. But most of the rest of the soundtrack is occupied with a truly unhinged score that sounds like composer Erik Friedlander is snapping rubber bands underwater. It's manic as hell, and while I secretly kind of like it, it's deeply distracting from the quiet dialogue-based story we're meant to be watching.

And then there are the two teen girls who lead the film. They're unequivocally great, and the fact that there are two teen girls bearing the entire weight of this movie on their backs is something tremendously fun and inspiring. Unfortunately, Anton Yelchin, who I like very much, seems to be acting in a completely different movie. He's being pushed into a cartoon character that would have worked in a film like Fright Night or even the bizarre Only Lovers Left Alive (he sure did make his share of vampire movies, didn't he?), but glances right off the grounded, intentionally flat performances of his co-stars.

Altogether I'm pretty sure I liked Thoroughbreds, but I'm absolutely certain that it takes someone of a very particular bent to love it, and I'm definitely not there. This movie makes me continue to be excited to follow the careers of Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, who I have seen and enjoyed in many previous genre efforts, but Cory Finley really needs to knock it out of the park next time to earn my trust.

TL;DR: Thoroughbreds has a solid dark comedy nugget at its center, but it's too stagebound to really do anything exciting with it.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 871

The First Witch Hunter

Year: 2016

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

It’s that time of year again. A wildly hyped arthouse horror film has hit the national stage with triumphant fanfare, ready to receive a merciless box office lashing. Two years ago it was Jennifer Kent’s chilling tale of motherhood gone sour, The Babadook. Then came the methodically crafted, variably successful sexual parable It Follows. This year we have The Witch, a contemplative New England folk tale from first-time director Robert Eggers. While I’m overjoyed that these very small, very cerebral horror films are finding audiences in a big way, setting these films up as “the scariest movie in a generation” destines them to failure and disappointment.

I mean, shouldn’t we have learned by now that Stephen King will give a blurb to pretty much anything? He’d regale a box of Corn Pops as “a triumph of terror” as long as it wasn’t directed by Stanley Kubrick. I’m not attempting to diminish the horror of the Witch in any way, which is very frequently visceral and overwhelming. However, my advice is to approach it devoid of any expectation one way or the other. I would hate to see another solid genre picture suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous hype.

Or by opposing, end its theatrical run.

In The Witch, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the eldest daughter of a British family in colonial New England. They have been banished from the nearby town due to her father William’s (Ralph Ineson) fervent, bordering on maniacal religious beliefs and are now struggling to subsist on a small farm perched on the edge of the forest, a gaping maw of wilderness the children are forbidden to enter. When the baby Samuel is snatched away by an unseen force while under Thomasin’s care, thus begins a period of turmoil and suspicion in the family.

As tensions rise between Thomasin, her father, her distraught mother Katherine (Kate Dickie), her lustful brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and the irritating twins Mercy (Ellie Graner) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), they begin to suspect their misfortune may be the result of witchcraft. Does a witch wander the wood, or is the treachery coming from within the family itself?

And will Sabrina ever get to go to the prom with Harvey?

The thing that immediately springs to mind when describing The Witch is that it’s very intentional. By that I mean that every aspect of the film is there for a reason, painstakingly placed to evoke a certain sensation. This is not a director who’s asleep at the wheel. From the color palette to the sparse dialogue to the blighted set design, The Witch can not fail to make an impression. In fact, it’s the first film I’ve personally seen that makes a spectacle of its alternative aspect ratio (1.66:1, shout out to my film nerds), practically screaming for you to notice that it’s just a little off from your standard American theatrical release.

However, intention and reception are very different beasts. While I can clearly see and respect the decision-making behind every aesthetic choice made in The Witch, I for one am not personally inclined to receive their messages in quite the way I’m meant to. Let me clarify. Take The Witch’s color palette, an elegantly bleak, nearly monochrome effort that leaches all color from the frame, leaving behind only a handful of dull greys. It’s an impressive technique, akin to creating a living charcoal sketch, but it fails to capture the eye.

The act of watching The Witch is an act of permanent frustration and struggle to focus on any image in the frame. This is clearly meant to foster a sense of oppression, blurring the lines of reality and driving home the cruel monotony of the family’s stranglehold on Thomasin’s life. However, it’s also a vexing distraction, making it nigh-on impossible to remain  engaged with the story. It constantly draws attention to its own artifice, which is a severe miscalculation in a film so devoted to historical accuracy.

God, that was verbose. Can you tell I’ve been reading Shakespeare again?

One more thing before I stop being so glum about The Witch: As much as I loathe when a film is discredited by its accents, the Yorkshire brogue that these actors spit out is nearly impenetrable, bolstered by the tough steel of their Olde English speech patterns. This is not a detraction, just a warning: Don’t check your brain at the door. You’re going to need it to crack the Enigma Code of the dialogue.

All that said, The Witch is an extremely unique movie that benefits greatly in how it differs from mainstream American horror. It’s a deliberately paced mood piece that aims to shock through barely-glimpsed horrors and unnatural images. Rather than being a jump scare jack-in-the-box, it relies on eerie situations so ontologically wrong that they cause the blood to boil. Mind you, the snowball doesn’t get to clobbering size until it has rolled for quite some time, but the earlier slow boil scenes are so wracked with heightened atmosphere that it proves effective if you have the patience to suffer its visual abrasiveness.

The single element that best sells the mood of the film is the cast, every member of which is uniformly terrific, even – God help me – the children. Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Dickie, and Ralph Ineson are equals in off-kilter character building, ramping up the tension with almost unbearably immediate, human performances. But for me, the biggest surprise was Harvey Scrimshaw, who can’t possibly be able to understand all the implications of his character at his tender age, but plays his part to the hilt, nailing every nuance with inhuman precision.

The Witch is an intelligent and visually bold horror film that brings something elegant and classical to the market, and I wish it every success. It’s more exciting to think about than to actually sit through, but for what it’s worth, it’s a bona fide work of art (with all the divisiveness that that entails), an astounding directorial debut for a filmmaker who, if he can keep this up, should land himself a place on every cinephile’s watchlist.

TL;DR: The Witch is a well-crafted, tense work with an intensely frustrating aesthetic.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1053