THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 75
vision of civilization molting away at
speed—“the decay or going to pieces
of his moral nature, a vain thing and a
handicap in the ruthless struggle for
existence.” That’s Buck, forgetting his
former self and learning to swipe food,
but it could be any man in a similar fix.
Little of that struggle persists in the
current film, which softens everything
it touches. Mortal peril gives way to
slapstick; atavistic fears are reduced to
a quizzical cock of the head; and, as
for Buck, he’s brave, he’s loyal, and he’s
about as forbidding as Scooby-Doo.
As I left the screening, I bumped into
Zeus, an Alaskan malamute of lupine
proportions. Though a gentle soul, he
had immense self-possession and a
magnificent coat, and, if it came to a
straight fight with Buck—not Lon-
don’s Buck but the one we’d just been
watching—my money would be on
Zeus. To be honest, even a Chinese
crested powderpuff would be in with
a chance.
T
he fact that the new Jane Austen
adaptation is titled not “Emma”
but “Emma.” should be taken, I imag-
ine, as a punctuational joke about pe-
riod drama. The script is by Eleanor
Catton, the author of “The Luminar-
ies,” and the director is Autumn de
Wilde. Until now, she has been famed
for her music videos and her photo-
graphs of bands, including Death Cab
for Cutie. Ideal training for the world
of Regency England.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma Wood-
house, “handsome, clever, and rich.” At
the mellow age of twenty-one, Emma
is an old hand at both scrutinizing and
choreographing the romantic endeav-
ors of other people. Or so she likes to
think, though her neighbor, senior, and
friend Mr. Knightley ( Johnny Flynn)
would beg to differ. To him, she is a
meddler. No good, he believes, will
come of her intrusions, especially in
the case of Harriet Smith (Mia Goth),
a young lady of nice comportment but
unknown parentage. Guided, or mis-
guided, by Emma, Harriet spurns the
hand of a mere farmer and aims for
seemlier targets. There is Mr. Elton
( Josh O’Connor), the local vicar, who,
like Mr. Collins, in “Pride and Preju-
dice,” reminds us that Austen could,
for the daughter of a rector, be with-
ering about men of God; Frank Chur-
chill (Callum Turner), an incoming cad
with thin eyes, beneath whose layers
of waistcoat lurks either a heart of flint
or, more likely, no heart at all; and even,
yes, Knightley himself.
This is one of those films which
begin haltingly and, bit by bit, develop
a smooth stride. The early sequences
are peremptory and pastel-hued, with
a jaunty score and a whiff of the fash-
ion show. The haberdashery in Em-
ma’s village is a decorous riot of silks
and trimmings, but so is the home that
she shares with her father (Bill Nighy),
a first-class hypochondriac. (In one
lovely shot, he is surrounded by so many
screens, each designed to fend off a
nonexistent draft, that all you can see
is his head.) Fans of Sofia Coppola’s
“Marie Antoinette” (2006) will be in
heaven, as will anyone who labors under
the impression that being alive in Aus-
ten’s day was like dwelling inside a doll’s
house, or a hatbox.
Yet something happens. Much as
the heroine of Max Ophüls’s “TheEarrings of Madame de ...” (1953) falls
in love with her partner in the course
of a single waltz, so Emma and Mr.
Knightley, hitherto content with ba-
dinage, surprise themselves into emo-
tional gravity, during a dance—in
closeup, to be exact, as their hands in-
terlock. The movie continues to find
strength in minor moments, as in the
picnic scene, on a hillside, when Emma
oversteps the mark and insults Miss
Bates (Miranda Hart), whose only
fault is a surplus of good will. When
I saw the film, there was a sharp com-
munal intake of breath around me;
thanks to Hart, we share in the gust
of confusion and hurt that crosses the
victim’s face.
In the wider scheme of things, of
course, a foolish remark, tossed from
one genteel person to another, with ser-
vants hovering in the background,
couldn’t matter less. But Austen knew
that, like it or not, we are stuck in a
narrower scheme, and that our fleeting
follies matter a great deal. That is why
“Emma” worked so well when trans-
planted to a high school, in “Clueless”
(1995), and why a reboot of that movie,
laced with the toxins of social media,
would be close to unendurable. De
Wilde’s film is a more clueful affair,
and Flynn (soon to star in a bio-pic of
David Bowie) makes an arresting
Knightley—more bruiser than smoothie,
with a hinterland of unhappiness. He
proposes, eventually, beneath the spread-
ing glories of a horse-chestnut tree in
flower. The doll’s house has been put
away, and nature is back in vogue. NEWYORKER.COM
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