Emma (1996)

Douglas McGrath's 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma arrives with impeccable manners and no visible interest in the preoccupations of a later century. Gwyneth Paltrow glides through the title role with a composure the film mistakes, gently, for wisdom. The cast is uniformly pale, the concerns uniformly domestic, and the moral universe bounded by a few Hampshire estates and the price of a decent carriage. We are asked to find charm in a young woman who sabotages her friend's romantic prospects and receives a mild scolding for it. The film complies. Jeremy Northam frowns beautifully. England endures.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film keeps its hands clean by never raising them. Emma possesses will and social agency, enough to register as a faint pulse of female self-determination, but the story remains a nineteenth-century marriage plot and resolves exactly as one. Class and wealth are observed with the detachment of a naturalist and never indicted. The drawing rooms contain no one who would trouble a modern casting director, and no theme arrives to announce itself. Toni Collette's fuller figure is a decision noted in interviews, not a thesis advanced by the text.

There is no sermon here, no lecture, no modern grievance smuggled into the drawing rooms. The film is a faithful, well-tailored adaptation that trusts Austen to carry the load, and she does. Rachel Portman's score won an Academy Award, the first for a woman in that category, a fact the film itself would never dream of mentioning. The result is pleasant, literate, and entirely of its period, which is to say it asks nothing of us but two hours and a tolerance for archery. We file it accordingly.