Hi everyone, it's Lauren and welcome to another episode of my Page to Screen
project, in this series
I take a classic book and watch all of the different TV adaptations, film
adaptations of it and then compare them In this episode we're going to be
looking at Jane Austen's Emma, which I must say has been a delightful episode
to do the research for because all or nearly all of the adaptations that I've watched
have been really really enjoyable
There are seven in all to get through so I have split this into two halves, we'll
be starting with the first four adaptations in this episode. Thre will be
spoilers for Emma, obviously, all the way throughout this video, just to make sure
everyone is back up to speed with the plot it follows the story of Emma
Woodhouse who is a high-class lady living alone with her father, her sister
has got married, her governess has got married and she's bored and so she
amuses herself by playing around the lives of the other people living in the
village of Highbury one of these is Harriet Smith who's a young girl from a close by
boarding school and Emma takes her on as a new companion in order to improve her
and get her well married
Other characters include Mr. Knightley whose brother is married to Emma's sister
who lives down the road
Mr. Elton who is a new vicar who is very pompous and Mrs. and Miss Bates who
are funny village gossip side characters So the first adaptation that I could
find is from 1972 and that is a TV mini-series. Unusually there doesn't seem
to be any classic cinema version of Emma I guess it's not really a gothic story
or anything but this seems to be the earliest version and it's fine. When
I watch these versions from the seventies and eighties they're always
okay this one is one of the better ones of that era
the acting is good in that I really like the interpretations of the characters, I
think each character has been realized really quite well but and then on the
other hand the acting is bad because it is very slow and not that convincing
it's not very naturalistic it does feel like I'm watching a play which is being
filmed
Having said that parts of it are very funny Mr. Elton is very funny as is
Mr. Woodhouse, the Harriet Smith I think is very good actually she's very very sweet
and very very simple and
she really made me laugh. As much as I enjoy the actor playing Emma I do feel
like she's portrayed her as quite matronly it's just odd, I don't know if
she is the right choice because she seems too old and too knowing
so this was fine as adaptations from that period go
I wouldn't necessarily suggest watching it now because it is quite slow it's a
lot of episodes and the story does seem to be quite dragged out but if you are
real fan of Emma and want to watch all of the adaptations, then this isn't bad
and then we don't have any other adaptations of Emma until 1995 and 1996
during which there are three and we have a bit of an Emma explosion on screen and
the first of these which you may have guessed is Clueless from 1995
This is a modern retelling of Emma and it focuses on the life of Cher who is a
spoiled girl in a high school, a new girls joins the school and she works on trying to
make her popular. I'm not going to go into all of the various merits of
Clueless in this video because we all know it's one of the best films ever
made but now that I'm actually comparing it to the source material
I think it's done very very well taking Emma and planting it in a high school
actually means that you get to keep the social classes because you have the in
crowd the out crowd at the school and people are aligning themselves to various groups
which mirrors up quite well with the class struggles that are going on in
Emma and they're also able to throw teenage parties in the same way the
parties are being thrown, balls are being held in the novel
so it's actually really faithful to the story of Emma
There's no Jane Fairfax or kind of Miss Bates characters although Cher does get
involved in setting up a pair of teachers which kind of shows her
tenacity and willingness to manipulate people's lives, but you do have the
Mr. Knightley character you do have the Frank Churchill character and overall
Emma goes on a similar journey of self-discovery and realizing that she's
actually very selfish and she should stop meddling in people's lives and
actually holding up Clueless against Ema you see a lot more similarities
then I certainly expected. We then have two fantastic versions of Emma from 1996
First of these is a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma and this is
really one of the most widely held definitive adaptations of Emma it's the
one everyone thinks of. Now this is good I think this is a good version
of Emma
I think it's very funny, I think Gwyneth Paltrow does a really good job with
Emma and her relationship with Mr. Knightley I think is really wonderful
you do get that payoff at the end when they finally get together and it has one
of the absolute best performances of Miss Bates in Sophie Thompson who is is
completely hilarious
Where I think this film falls a little bit short is getting kind of the wider
subtext, Gwyneth Paltrow is quite a nice
Emma, I mean she's got some strength and she's got some humor there but she's not
quite as selfish or as destructive as I think she should be in the book and I
don't think this is helped by Ewan McGregor's Frank Churchill which is
frankly just a very wet performance
So I think when they are toying with Jane Fairfax and making up this
backstory for her and trying to work out what's going on with her love life I
just don't really believe it and I think in doing that you lose some of the
things that are most clever about Emma
Also as much as it pains me to say it i really don't
rate Toni Collette as Harriet Smith. I love Toni Collette I think she's a
fantastic actress and she's ok in this but for me Harriet should be
younger perhaps, kind of stupid but just because she's young and naive and ditzy
that's not how I see Harriet and very nice and very willing to trust in
Emma
whereas Toni Collette I feel is almost too knowing to play her and also she portrays
her a bit more of a kind of bumbling fool and and less just naive but there's
nothing wrong with it
she just has a completely different take on what I think that part should be so
personally I just think some of the performances in this film let it down
which is a shame because overall it's a really good solid attempt to Emma and is
really very enjoyable to watch and the overarching direction
I think it's very good but it does just slightly away from the original text the
The next adaptation that we're looking at also from 1996 is a TV adaptation a made-for-tv film
and it stars Kate Beckinsale as Emma and this
I had no expectations about and was so pleasantly surprised, I think it's a
fantastic adaptation of Emma and where the Gwyneth Paltrow movie falls down this
film really kind of widens your understanding of the social goings-on at
Highbury. Kate Beckinsale is just fantastic is Emma and I think she really
brings something else the part that is perhaps lacking slightly from Gwyneth
Paltrow's portrayal
She just seems a little bit more underlyingly wicked and a bit more fun
and just a little bit more willful perhaps I also think that Samantha
Morton's portrayal of Harriet Smith is probably at this stage
one of my favorite Harriet Smiths she just has that perfect balance of naivety
and is being so nice and sweet but then also a little bit clumsy in a little bit
silly but you can really see her underlying merits and you can
understand why people like her and want to befriend her. Like I said one of the
things that this film does really well is kind of work on the subtext of Emma
little bit more and you see Emma's brain clicking around when she's thinking
about people and imagining their weddings and it's a very quick way of
communicating to the viewer that this is what Emma is thinking, this is what she's
doing, she's kind of manipulating everybody, she's got a little web and
she's got her hopes and dreams and I think it's portrayed really well and
just really simply and effectively. Now conversely with this film I feel like it
let down actually buy some of the smaller characters the supporting
characters the Miss Bates isn't quite as funny nor is the Mrs. Elton
but interestingly I have to think that Jane Fairfax is very good in this
because she's just really boring and it annoyed me as a viewer as someone who is
watching this from Emma's point of view her trying to initiate conversation from
Jane just was so hard and it was just irritating me that Jane was just so
passive and I know that that's not necessarily what the situation is meant
to be, that's just Emma's perception of the situation but it really did get you
on her side as a viewer there
and everybody else was sort of out to get her and why should be friends with
Jane Fairfax when she's so annoying?
So I really enjoyed watching all four really of these adaptations of Emma, in
my next episode I'm going to be looking at the most recent three there's one
from the BBC starring Romola Garai
I'm going to be looking at Ema Approved the online web series and another modern
retelling called Aisha so that episode, Part 2 is going to be up next week so
I'm also going to be discussing my favorite portrayals and adaptations of
Emma overall as well so I will look forward to seeing you then and do let me
know if any of these are your favorite adaptations of Emma in the comments
section below, bye!
it was written by Bertolt Brecht in Germany