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)

International Woman Of Mystery

Year: 2015

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Jude Law

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Is it just me, or are Apatow comedies better when he’s not actually directing them? So far, I’d say the best to come from his stable are pretty unequivocally Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids and Nick Stoller’s Neighbors. Feig’s most recent bout in the ring isn’t exactly proving me wrong. Spy, his newest Melissa McCarthy vehicle, might just be the apotheosis of everything that that collective has been working toward: a brash, fearless, and fun genre exercise that blows everything that came before it right on out of the water.

Hell, it even blows itself out of the water.

Spy tells the story of CIA agent Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), a timid woman who squanders her potential by working behind a desk, providing navigation for the inexplicably British Agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), on whom she has a crush the size of a moon-destroying rocket. When one of his missions is compromised by the wicked heiress Reina (Rose Byrne), the CIA discovers that she knows the identities of all their active agents. In desperation, they send Susan after her, because she’s unrecognizable.

Thus begins a heartwarming tale of a mousy pushover stepping into the spotlight to become the butt-kicking superspy she always knew she could be. Well, in time. First she must fight her way through a series of wacky hijinks, aided by her coworker and friend Nancy (Miranda Hart).

Who I recognized from this awesome Mamma Mia! parody because I’m cultured.

Spy is, to put it lightly, an experience. It’s a female-led Austin Powers that - like Bridesmaids – isn’t FOR women. It’s WITH women for EVERYONE. And there really is something for everybody here. The raunchy comedy is spliced onto a legitimate action thriller that devotes as much attention to high octane spy escapades as it does to belly laughs.

While we’re on the subject of bellies, I really have to commend this film for not using McCarthy’s weight as a punchline. She’s a remarkably talented comic actress, but previous vehicles for her like the abhorrent Identity Thief center her character and humor entirely around her weight It’s crass, it’s unfair, and it’s dreadfully boring.

In Spy, her character has her fair share of flaws, but her size isn’t even a factor in her initial lack of appeal. In fact, the only joke that could really be considered a fat joke is just a pratfall. The truly unfortunate thing is that the trailers latched onto that scene like it was a slice of toast bearing the face of the Virgin Mary, hopelessly misrepresenting the film and causing me to skip it in theaters. Hence, this egregiously late review.

But I have since rectified my mistake, and I am here to tell you that, if you haven’t seen Spy, you’re missing out. Humor is entirely subjective, of course, but the fact that both Sergio and I found Spy to be the funniest movie of the year should tell you something. We’re hardly ever on the same page.

Hell, that guy loves Winter’s Bone, which is as far from being a Brennan movie as a Rob Zombie reboot of Grease.

Spy’s humor comes from a variety of places: spy parody, McCarthy improve, Apatowian gross-out antics, and secondhand embarrassment all jockey for position. But in addition to McCarthy, who is a reliably bankable humorist, big chuckles come form two unexpected performers. First of all, Rose Byrne  - who is already well on her way to comic superstardom thanks to her being the single best element of Neighbors – is incontestably hilarious as the spoiled and evil antagonist with a heart of gold leaf. Her performance is so consistently out of left field that she always keeps you on your toes.

But the true lightning in a bottle standout of Spy is one Jason Statham, as McCarthy’s careless and vain coworker who tails her incognito as she attempts to covertly carry out her mission. He distills the essence of every Jason Statham character into one stiletto sharp caricature, blowing his typical badass bravado tremendously out of proportion. It’s a genius portrayal, a character with infinite confidence in his own abilities without actually being any help at all. He is not always served well by the Apatow-standard editing, which just lets him keep going and neglects to trim his one-liners to an appropriate amount. I call this the “quip tsunami” technique, and while hilarious at time, it’s less controlled here than in similar films. Nevertheless, Statham is a sparkling presence in an already uncontrollably fun movie.

The best thing about Spy is that, even if you utterly detest the comedy, you can tune it out and still have a one hundred percent functional spy picture. The action is ludicrous and over-the-top, but it’s not like you’ll get anything different if you shell out for Spectre. And this way you don’t have to pretend to care about Bond’s awkward, fumbling chemistry with his wallpaper love interest. It’s a win-win! Spy’s action benefits from a truly staggering budget for a comedy, which allows it to indulge in just as much globetrotting splendor as the best of the best.

With the humor of a Bridesmaids and the absurd, slightly inappropriate swashbuckling of an Octopussy, Spy is just plain a fun time at the movies. The best of the constantly improving McCarthy-Feig pictures, Spy actually gives me high hopes for the new Ghostbusters. Sleuth it out of Redbox and snag yourself a good time!

TL;DR: Spy is an excellent, female led comedy that combines Bondian thrills with uproarious comedy.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 941