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)

Census Flashback: Double Dipping Devilry

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Deadpool 2, which sees Josh Brolin returning to the world of Marvel as the villain Cable mere weeks after his universe-threatening appearance as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, I'll be exploring an 80's slasher where the lead villain also played double duty. In 1989 Robert England continued his landmark role as Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, but he also played another infamous villain in that same year's The Phantom of the Opera, which we'll be discussing today.

Year: 1989

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Robert Englund, Jill Schoelen, Alex Hyde-White

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what it is about classic French literature and pop culture, but two of the most adapted novels in the world are Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Both books have received the movie treatment more than a dozen times apiece, not to mention TV specials, comics (seriously), and modernizations, as well as one extravagantly popular Broadway musical apiece. 

Phantom is pretty explicitly a horror novel (though certain people choose to highlight the romance over the monstrous element), so it's not shocking that the genre got its grubby little hands on it, as early as 1925. But what's even less shocking is that 80's horror got a swipe in at the property, because if there was one thing genre filmmakers of the time loved more than a new concept for a slasher movie, it was a well-known property already in the public domain. And why not get Robert Englund, for whom playing a man with a hecked-up face was his bread and butter, and who could at least get some literary cred from playing the role? Toss in the director of the exceedingly solid Halloween 4, the special effects guru behind Chucky, the Crypt Keeper, and Freddy himself, plus 80's shlock mega-producer Menahem Golan, and it's a match made in heaven.

Or hell, if you will.

So, the plot should seem pretty familiar, give or take a couple little embellishments. We start off in the 80's for no clear reason other than to gently ease its viewers into a period piece slasher film, following Christine Day (Jill Schoelen, the queen of late 80's/early 90's B-horror, who at this time was fresh off The Stepfather and Cutting Class) as she scours a rare bookstore for material to use during her opera audition. She stumbles across a battered copy of Don Juan Triumphant, and during her audition is hit on the head with a sandbag (?), which sends her back in time (?) to nineteenth century London, when the piece was first written by Erik Destler (Robert Englund, who was by that point a worldwide cultural phenomenon - that very year he was appearing in Freddy drag on MTV left and right).

Christine doesn't seem to realize that she has been transported back into the past, so this whole thing is pretty pointless. I guess they're going for a Mummy-esque reincarnated love thing, but let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it makes a lick of sense. She is a young soprano understudy for the diva La Carlotta (Stephanie Lawrence), but she receives voice lessons from a mysterious angelic figure known as the Phantom, who murders the piss out of anybody who gets in her way. Anyway, it turns out the Phantom is Erik (duh), who has sold his soul to the devil (?), as portrayed by a little person (?), which has made his face all burned and scarred (??). Cue a lot of bad opera and mediocre slashing.

And makeup that's even frightening when it's supposed to seem normal.

Yup, this is one of those cases where the slasher stars seem to have aligned, but alack, those stars got crossed somewhere along the line and it was not meant to be. Phantom of the Opera wants to be a legitimate adaptation of its literary source material and the trashy B-slasher it was always meant to be, but it can't have its cake and stab it too. The slasher elements undercut any ability to take it seriously, and the serious elements make the slasher a bit of a tedious slog.

At every opportunity, Phantom cuts itself short. You can tell it wants to have the quippy punnery of a Freddy Krueger adventure, but then it would tip its hand too far in the "stupid slasher" direction, so it contents itself with some light, playful japing that glances right off the scene and immediately out of one's memory. And it very clearly desires to be an icky, gross-out horror flick, at which it only intermittently succeeds.

Thanks to Kevin Yagher, the moments where the gore comes to the forefront are spectacular. Especially any time we see the Phantom either assembling or dismantling the false skin he wears to get around in the world, it's stomach-churningly gooey grue that lights up the screen. This sensibility is also applied to a certain number of the deaths, especially in the early going, but for some unfathomable reason the bulk of the murders are rendered as run-of-the-mill gut stabbings that completely lack flair and barely shed a drop of blood.

It's telling that this is about the most dynamic screenshot I can find.

That lack of flair isn't isolated to the murder scenes, unfortunately. Although Halloween 4 did sometimes have the tendency to look a bit like a TV movie, at least it had atmosphere. Here, the lighting scheme wouldn't be out of place at a community center bar mitzvah. See, a huge production is made out of candlelit rooms, and the fact that the Phantom lurks in the shadows to hide his twisted visage. But whenever he blows out a candle to hide his face, the room is still so blasted with light that it looks like he's on the set of King of Queens. If anything, the room seemed darker before the candle blew out. The lighting is so conspicuously inappropriate that it drags you cornea-first out of the movie, undermining the character to a ruthlessly extreme degree.

This is a real shame, because Robert Englund clearly cared about this character. The apathy that defines his Dream Child performance is completely absent here, and he's trying his darnedest to assemble something resembling pathos from the role. It all falls apart like a sand castle too close to the tide, but it's not his fault. There is hardly an inch of plot to hang this performance on within the repetitive (yet somehow infrequent) slashings and endless scenes of Jill Schoelen lip syncing to a deeply milquetoast opera track with English lyrics that feel like they were ripped from a seventh grader's songwriting journal.

I dearly wish The Phantom of the Opera had been much better than it was. Period piece horror films aren't exactly a dime a dozen, and when one gets a chunk of change significant enough to make that a reality, I always hope for the best. Unfortunately for the slasher genre in 1989, "the best" was never really an option. It's Robert Englund's best film of the year by a country mile, but that's praise so faint it can't even muster up the energy to damn anything.

Killer: Erik Destler (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Christine Day (Jill Schoelen)

Best Kill: Most of the kills are pretty bog-standard, but during the Phantom's first kill, blood covers his face as it contorts with orgasmic delight, which is pretty intense. Also eventually the body is hung up in a closet, sans skin, which is likewise rather intense.

Sign of the Times: When she returns to present day, Christine discovers the completed version of Don Juan Triumphant on a floppy disk.

Scariest Moment: When Christine first discovers the pages of the opera and sings them aloud, the notes on the page turn into drops of blood.

Weirdest Moment: Christine's best friend in the framing sequence is played by Molly Shannon in her first film role.

Champion Dialogue: "Better submerged in bathwater than mediocrity."

Body Count: 10

1. Joseph is gutted with a knife while being winched up into the air.
2. Ruffian #1 is stabbed in the gut.
3. Ruffian #2 is decapitated with a knife.
4. Lead Ruffian is stabbed in the gut.
5. Harrison has his head crushed with a towel.
6. La Carlotta is beheaded offscreen, and her head is boiled into a soup.
7. Rat Catcher is impaled on a spike.
8. Morris has his throat slit offscreen.
9. Davis has his heart pulled out of his chest.
10. Richard is stabbed with a candle holder and burned alive.

TL;DR: The Phantom of the Opera is an admirable effort, but grafting a slasher onto classic literature rendered both of those things not particularly interesting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1493