so have you seen the latest
adaptation of jane austen's emma it was
put out in 2020 and i feel like
there are so many different opinions
about this movie
but today i'm going to be giving you
mine in this review of
emma 2020 my name is ellie dashwood and
this is my channel where i talk about
history classic literature
and writing if you like any of those
things please subscribe
the opinions about emma 2020 are so
polarized it either is the extreme side
of oh it's the best movie ever made
or the exact opposite of emma 2020
classifies as one of the catastrophes
of 2020. first i want to dive into
an analysis of it so first just talking
about
visually this film is absolutely
stunningly gorgeous but i feel like it's
incredibly stylized and unrealistic
for example if you look at pride and
prejudice 2005 that which is a stunning
film too
they did it in this very natural organic
way that was
super believable meanwhile emma feels
like a tim
burton movie meets someone's art school
graduate
project we see that through the sets
through the color scheme there's a
very definite color scheme running
through every single scene of that movie
overall it is very very pretty the other
thing i want to talk about is that they
really were going for a comical
perspective
of emma a little bit i noticed
especially
earlier in the film in certain scenes
such as when she's holding the baby
they went to extremes in this movie jane
austen
is always actually kind of comical but
she does it in this very like
understated a subtle way while this
movie
definitely brought that out in an
extreme form
they left all subtlety at the door and
just went for it and the servants
i feel like the servants were partially
there for comic effect but i felt like
there was some
underlying social commentary they were
trying to give about how
the rich people are really spoiled and
they're just like demanding on their
servants and ordering them around and
constantly waited on
and while i understand that that's what
they were trying to
portray i feel like it was done in a
super unrealistic way
because really servants were workers who
had real jobs they had real
responsibilities they had duties they
just did not stand around all day
waiting for people to give them orders
they already had their orders that's why
if
somebody wants one of them they have to
ring a bell because
they're busy that's the whole point of
service well meanwhile it seems like the
servants in this version of emma
stand there 90 of their life so one of
the
great things about jane austen movies is
a lot of them
all have very stereotypical parts
there's always the ridiculous clergyman
the dad who's not always helpful when it
comes to romance
or the untrustable rogue
so wouldn't it be great if while
watching your favorite jane austen film
you could play jane austen bingo where
the squares are jane austen tropes and
you can play against your family and
friends and see who wins first
well guess what i made jane austen bingo
for you
you can download a free printable pdf
pack
of jane austen bingo cards by signing up
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my newsletter from the link in the
description below
it is very fun if i do say so myself
midly i
made it so i might be slightly biased
but definitely
get your free jane austen bingo pack
today
by signing up for my newsletter
in the link below like i already said so
next up i want to talk about i think the
biggest issue most people have with this
movie which is
emma herself now the characterization of
emma is a perfect example of them taking
something to the extreme and adapting it
to modern sensibilities
because when we look at emma that jane
austen wrote i feel like
basically she's this good-hearted girl
who has been
a bit spoiled in her childhood she
thinks too well of herself
but overall she's 90 good
and cares about other people and wants
to be helpful and loving
and i think that's why people love emma
so i feel like they came into this
version and were like oh well
it says she's arrogant and stuck up and
has all these lessons to learn
let's make her the most sourest brat on
the entire planet because
if i described a person in 2020 the way
they describe
emma this is what i think she would look
like now i think we have to go back to
realizing that
jane austen's regency world had an
entirely
different scale of morality and
character and what people
should be like so i'm going to give you
an example of this
which is the famous hand flex scene
from pride and prejudice 2005 where you
know darcy
helps elizabeth get into the carriage
and their hands touch and then
he gets hang on flexes when he walks
away because he's like i touched a lot
of it
so some regency people would be like
elizabeth and darcy which is totally
getting physical
this is quite scandalous well i feel
like
two in regency times they had the
getting physical level of
lydia running away with wickham and
shacking up in london
so they're getting physical scale went
from hand
touch to shacking up in london okay
so thinking about this scale for example
with emma's personality
of being sort of arrogant and stuck up
we have
arrogant and stuck up to being the worst
person alive
and the most sours ever see how there's
a scale there
so emma's personality flaws were more
like
hand flex 2005 version
of character defects and they came in in
this emma 2020
and made her the equivalent of lydia
shacking up with wickham in london
defects they did this because in 2020
our
era we don't really have hand flex right
and
if people are getting physical in movies
in 2020 they're literally stacking up in
london together
when they read in this character they
translated it
through the perspective of 2020 which i
feel like
greatly distorted who she was and
made her kind of really unlikable for a
lot of the movie
this caused a problem with emma's
personality overall because it caused
a contradictory confusing
situation that required a complete
suspension
of disbelief to accept because here
we have them trying to adapt emma of the
book
who acts and behaves in a very
good-hearted way
especially in a lot of the vital scenes
of the book and they're trying to make
her look
like this completely stuck-up brat but
then
it's almost like she has to have this
dual personality of where she's a
stuck-up frap
most of the scenes and then all of a
sudden a major scene like i talked about
would come along
and she had to completely flip her
personality to behave like emma did in
the book
and then she like flips back to being a
stuck up rack
and continues it required yeah me to
essentially be like
i see what they did there it doesn't
work but i'm just gonna have to accept
this that that's what they did feel like
two they took emma's overall story
arc and they changed it in an
interesting way
throughout the entire book of emma she
learns
lessons gradually as she comes across
different important mistakes she makes
in her life which i feel like is what we
do as humans
right we learn this lesson and then we
learn that lesson and then we learn this
lesson
where emma in the movie sort of sails
through a lot of the lessons
for example harriet's first heartbreak
over mr elton
she's not that upset about it even
harriet doesn't seem that upset about it
honestly
so all this doesn't phase her that
definitely had major effects
on her in the book until the scene after
box hill which is when she's very mean
to miss bates
and mr nightly lectures her and so
then all of a sudden she totally has all
the life lessons
all at once she's just so heartbroken
about it
that created very unnatural story art
and something that was definitely
different from the book
and it also caused a lot of deviations
from the book
because again i think they were trying
to make it more acceptable to
our modern sensibilities i think we
especially see this
from the point where mr nightly proposes
on she goes and she directly interferes
with robert martin's second proposal by
being like hey
i have to confess to you and you should
go propose that does not happen in the
book
and i don't think it would happen in
regency england
and then again emma's personality
problems presented themselves in the
emma nightly relationship
which was nightly loves emma because
her heart's basically good in the book
and yes he lectures her a lot on her
faults
but as imperfect humans we all have many
faults
now in this movie i'm just like why does
he like emma on what planet does mr
nightly like this girl who acts like
this and i was watching a movie with my
sister and she agreed it's like what on
earth does mr nightly
see in this version of emma and i think
that
significantly hurt the romance in the
movie at least for me
also emma's a lot more flippant and rude
to mr knightley in this version now
let's talk about mr nightly for a minute
i feel like mr
knightley's character development was
very low we didn't get to see a lot of
those great defining moments where he is
the definition of a gentleman i feel
like when i think of knightley that's
what i think of he is
100 what a gentleman should be and i
don't think we saw that
in this movie but you know what we did
see in the movie mr knightley's butt
why who's like you know what emma needs
naked mr knightley right it's brilliant
my mom pointed this out which is
they were trying to get the rating score
up on emma because if you take out the i
don't know half a second
scene of mr nightly changing his clothes
and being naked
there's nothing else that would have
raised the ranking
of emma from g to pg-13 and so
i feel like some movies do this they'll
throw in a cuss word here or there
in order to up their ranking because
apparently people don't want to see
rated g movies
i don't know g movies are the best guys
so too if you look at the romantic
misunderstandings
or development in this movie in general
it's very hard to understand if you
don't know the background
of emma for example mr churchill and
emma flirt a lot more i think
in the book and in other versions of
emma that you
understand why mr knightley thinks that
emma likes mr gertill but in this one
it's
so subtle that you could miss it and
then it's the same thing with
mr elton mr elton hitting on emma is so
subtle you could miss it and i feel like
that greatly hurts the film
again let's talk about deviations in the
emma nightly relationship such as their
very romantic dance
at the ball and then he runs after her
all the way home and they have this
moment where you feel like they both
know
they like each other but then all of a
sudden it's like wait
no mr knightley thinks that she likes mr
churchill
and emma thinks that he likes harriet
but really i feel like after that whole
ball scene that's
not really believable it's like first of
all both of those things are
so subtle while the ball scene is so
extreme
how could you be confused right and so
i feel like their deviations and
extremes or subtlety of leaving things
out
definitely hurts the understanding of
the plot line
so also i just want to take a minute and
talk about jane fairfax
who comes off in this version as very
stuck-up and antagonistic towards emma
versus usually being a shy
reclusive person who's hiding a secret
and stressed out because if you
read the final scene between jane
fairfax and emma in the book
that scene could never happen between
the jane and the
emma of emma 2020 and i don't really
understand
why they did this to jane fairfax except
for the fact that i feel like
they were trying to maybe show her as a
more
empowered version of jane because jane i
feel like
can come off as very passive in the book
but then again jane austen did not write
and empower jane fairfax now did she
no between that and also how harriet's
storyline ends
harry i feel like is also much more
empowered by the end of this movie than
she is by the book
and the change in emma where she's
suddenly
adopting more modern sensibilities i
feel like all of this just shows that
the movie makers
were not happy with the way that jane
austen
ended emma and they wanted a more modern
finish to the story the final thing i'm
going to talk about
the storyline just one major thing which
is
all the kissing at the end it's like
this is the
emma where everyone's making out in the
end of the movie
but seriously i think it's a very
interesting choice to end it that way
so overall i ended up liking this movie
more than i thought i would
and i feel like part of that came from
the fact that i went
into watching it with such low
expectations
i was like i'm going to 100 hate this
that when i only
like 70 percent hated it i was like oh
wow that was surprisingly good
the more i watch it the more i like it
but it requires me again to have this
complete suspension of disbelief
that this characterization of emma's
even
humanly possible in one person it also
requires me
to accept the highly stylized look and
just
go with it and again i think it does
require an understanding of emma's true
storyline
to fill in the gaps of the confusing
parts but of course my favorite version
of emma will always be bbc's emma 2009
unless the bbc puts out an even better
version which i don't know if they
possibly can
so let me know in the comments below
what you think of emma 2020
and what is your favorite version of
emma again my name is ellie dashwood
this is my channel and keep being
awesome
because you're awesome
you