The Wall.St Journal 21Feb2020

version Mr. Knightley is played

forthrightly by Johnny Flynn,

while Josh O’Connor strikes a

plaintive note as Mr. Elton, the

ambitious young vicar who’s in

love with Emma’s fortune. Not just

plaintive but ardent and other-

worldly; close your eyes and he’s a

soundalike for the alien Mathesar

in “Galaxy Quest.”

CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS/AMAZON STUDIOS (3)

FOCUS FEATURES

Anya Taylor-Joy stars in the title role of Autumn de Wilde’s screen adaptation

IT’S A SMALLthing, to be sure,

but one of those details that re-

flects a larger approach to style in

“Emma,” Autumn de Wilde’s

screen adaptation of the oft-filmed

Jane Austen novel. Near the begin-

ning Bill Nighy, as the heroine’s fa-

ther, Mr. Woodhouse, makes an at-

tention-getting entrance.

Descending a flight of stairs, he

jumps down the last two or three

steps, landing firmly on his feet

with a resounding bang.

Why would the director have

her actor do that? Because it’s

funny, of course, a lively touch for

the good-hearted old geezer. But

it’s also gratuitous. Henry Wood-

house isn’t athletic. He’s in chroni-

cally poor health. The author’s

term for him was “valetudinarian,”

which means genuinely sick as

well as worried about being sick. A

fuller reason for the directorial

choice might be that Ms. De Wilde,

an accomplished photographer and

music-video director making her

feature debut, is smitten by sur-

faces, intrigued by amusing antics,

loves how things look.

Her production, which was de-

signed by Kave Quinn and shot by

young actress. She surely could

have made an enchanting Emma if

enchantment had been asked of

her by Ms. De Wilde and the

screenwriter, Eleanor Catton. In-

stead, this latest incarnation of

the compulsive matchmaker

checks most of the boxes duti-

fully. She is pert, bright, heed-

lessly privileged and properly

selfish, but never particularly lik-

able, let alone endearing. She ma-

nipulates those around her with

more purpose than charm, to the

accompaniment of an intrusive

score that’s the musical definition

of self-enchantment.

Jane Austen’s book, as you may

remember, provided the inspira-

tion for Amy Heckerling’s contem-

porary update in the delightful

1995 teen comedy “Clueless,”

which starred Alicia Silverstone.

That was followed one year later

by Douglas McGrath’s enjoyable

“Emma,” with Gwyneth Paltrow

making the matches, and, in 2009,

by the superb BBC miniseries star-

ring a luminous Romola Garai,

with Michael Gambon as Mr.

Woodhouse and Jonny Lee Miller

as George Knightley. In the current

FILM REVIEW| JOE MORGENSTERN

‘Emma’: Style Sense, Shallow Sensibility

‘H

unters” (Friday,

Amazon Prime) is

set in 1970s New

York, home to an

improbable organi-

zation of plotters dedicated to

finding Nazis in America and dis-

posing of them. Such are the facts

that confront 19-year-old Jonah

(Logan Lerman) in episode 1 of

this richly inventive and also fre-

quently appalling 10-part series

about a handful of Jews and allies

of various faiths, races and sexual

preferences—“Hunters” can’t be

charged with slighting diversity

requirements—who constitute the

group that tracks the Nazis. Cer-

tain members of the team, survi-

vors of the death camps, have

vivid personal memories of those

Germans. Furthermore it’s re-

cently become clear that more

Germans like those devoted to

Hitler are everywhere in America

now and they’re not just living

quiet lives—they’re part of a

movement to create a Fourth

Reich.

Jonah stumbles on these facts

in a time of inconsolable grief,

movingly conveyed by Mr. Lerman.

A record store clerk and small-

time dealer of pot—the latter, to

make enough money to support

himself and his adored grand-

mother, Ruth (Jeannie Berlin)—

he’s now lost the most important

person in his life. Ruth has been

murdered by a mysterious in-

truder. Driven by a fierce need to

find the killer, Jonah soon finds

himself in trouble from which he’s

rescued by the mysterious Meyer

Offerman, a rich stranger who

turns out to be the commander-in-

chief, of sorts, of the hunters. He’s

portrayed by Al Pacino, in a majes-

tic performance alive with wit and

warmth—the presence that holds

the face of a

mortal threat—

none who

would, for in-

stance, decide it

was best not to

keep on singing

“Hava Nagila” if

doing that

meant being

killed on the

spot. Portrayals

of this sort

about existence

in the camps—a

place where, as

the world

knows, Jews

fought with all

their might to

survive, to live

another day;

where they prayed, when the SS

made their regular selections for

the gas chambers, that they would

not be among those selected—do

not, to put it mildly, make for per-

suasive drama. They are what they

seem: nonsense, and a degrada-

tion of the reality that was.

Matters like this aside, along

with the graphic torture scenes,

there’s much that’s compelling

about this buoyant and ambitious

series, not least its detailed pic-

ture of the Nazi-hunting team pur-

suing leads. And the priceless

scenes in which grandparents

Mindy and Murray Markowitz

(Carol Kane and Saul Rubinek) sit

in their Brooklyn apartment suc-

cessfully breaking the codes the

agents of the Fourth Reich use to

send messages over the radio. It

may not be Bletchley Park, but it

works.

Hunters

Friday, Amazon Prime

their illustrious careers—a matter

that becomes, in this series, an ob-

ject of powerfully bitter satire.

There are times, it should be

said, when the series itself be-

comes a worthy object of satire.

Times when the heroic theme of

victims who triumph over their

tormentors runs amok. Every-

where in “Hunters” the spirit of

that heroism reigns, including in

the flashbacks to the death camps.

Here, masses of people in striped

suits with the yellow stars are

models of proud defiance. In one

segment a group of men decide to

defy their German guard by sing-

ing a merry Jewish song. Jewish

songs are forbidden, the furious

guard shouts again and again. But

the singers keep on singing, and

won’t stop even when the guard

shoots and kills one of them. Still

they keep singing and the guard

keeps shooting, till all the singers

are dead.

There are, in this series, no

captive Jews willing to yield in

the series together. There’s a touch

of silken menace about him, not

surprisingly. He is, after all, a man

who believes, as he explains, “The

best revenge is revenge.” It’s from

Offerman that Jonah learns, to his

astonishment, that his gentle

grandmother Ruth was the chief

intelligence expert for the team,

the inexhaustible and relentless

compiler of the group’s encyclope-

dic wanted-Nazi files.

There’s not much about the first

episodes of “Hunters” (creator, Da-

vid Weil; producer Jordan Peele)

that doesn’t feel improbable until,

as happens soon enough, a certain

logic establishes itself bit by sear-

ing bit—a flash of images from the

past, old tattered photos, or the ca-

sually revealed sight on a summer’s

day of an Auschwitz serial number

on the arm of a woman strolling

down a busy American street.

There’s logic, of another kind,

in the aforementioned appalling

moments—scenes in which the

hunter team inflicts grotesque

forms of torture on the Nazis they

capture, both to extract informa-

tion and exact vengeance. The

punishments are especially de-

signed for each captured Nazi. A

music-loving former torturer, for

instance, has his eardrums de-

stroyed with rock music.

Meanwhile, the new generation

of Germans is abroad in the land,

plotting the establishment of the

Fourth Reich and headed by a

woman known only as the Colonel

(Lena Olin). One of their members

has infiltrated President Jimmy

Carter’s staff. “Hunters” is at its

black-humor best when dealing

with the Nazi plotters, one of

whom, we learn, works at a local

supermarket.

“Hunters” sets its sights on a

wide range of targets. Prominent

among them, the U.S. government’s

speedy decision, after Germany’s

surrender, to collect talented Ger-

man scientists who had loyally

served Hitler and bring them to

America, where they could continue

Christopher Blauvelt, does look

lovely. Its textures and colors are

exotic—was that gown fuchsia or

amaranth?—and its star, Anya

Taylor-Joy, fills the title role with

precocious grace. What’s missing

is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s

performance, like others in the

film, is wittier than what’s actu-

ally on screen); connective tissue

(the story is semicoherent at best,

a jumble of characters rushing to

and fro); and depth of feeling (an

exception being the startling mo-

ment when Emma, in a sudden

flash of cruelty during the Box

Hill outing, humiliates the com-

pulsively prolix Miss Bates, played

wonderfully well by Miranda Hart,

and your heart, no pun intended,

instantly goes out to the poor

spinster).

Ms. Taylor-Joy made her own

feature debut in 2015’s “The

Witch,” an extraordinary first fea-

ture by Robert Eggers. She played

Thomasin, an innocent child mis-

taken for a witch by her fanatical

parents in 17th-century New Eng-

land. Her performance, which I

called perfectly breathtaking, was

the work of an abundantly gifted

Al Pacino and Logan Lerman, above; Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane, right;

and a scene from ‘Hunters,’ top, on Amazon Prime

TELEVISION REVIEW| DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Revenge Is the Best Revenge

A group of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York try to prevent the rise of a Fourth Reich

A10|Friday,February21, 2020 THEWALLSTREETJOURNAL.

LIFE&ARTS