My first introduction to Jane Austen was BBC's wonderful Pride & Prejudice - so how excited was I to get my hands on this one? Not very, once I started watching it. After I'd watched P&P I went out and bought the book, immediately, and read and reread it. And then I rewatched the show and was delighted at how faithful it stayed to the book, and how well cast every single person in it was.
Since then P&P and Emma have remained my two absolute favorite Austens. Let me begin by saying that I know that people say that books don't work as movies, but I'm sorry, I think movies like P&P disprove that. So when I say that they took the book Emma and decided that Austen just wasn't 'snappy' enough for the screen so they'd just take the liberty of changing a whole bunch of dialogue... I hope you understand just how much I take that as an indication that they should never have been allowed to make the book into a movie in the first place. For the length this goes on, there is no excuse for it not to have been a highly faithful and well performed adaptation. Instead it is bits and bites of Austen with plenty of "well we'll just make this better for TV" dialogue smothering those bits and bites. Jane Austen's dialogue is what *makes* her stories. She was an incredible writer, and to have the guts of Emma torn out and replaced with someone else's writing is like saying "well we're going to be displaying the Mona Lisa next week, but first we're going to paint over it, maybe add some eyebrows and a real smile, you know?"
I managed to sit through the whole thing in the hopes I'd finally hit the point where Emma becomes charming, and Mr. Knightley becomes dashing, and Mr. Woodhouse becomes a dear (and lord, what an utter *waste* of getting Michael Gambon of all people to be in your movie!), and Frank Churchhill to become irresistibly casually flirtatious - but the characters were all ... very ... boring. There were a few tantalizing bits where I thought at least the Jane/Emma final scenes might be worth it but they were over almost as fast as they'd begun.
Honestly, this is only the second version of Emma I've ever seen. And since the first was the Gwyneth Paltrow version, I had absolutely no doubts that this version, longer *and* made by the BBC would blow it out of the water. But you know what? I think the Paltrow version actually had better casting, and kept *more* of Austen's dialogue in than this one. Badly done, BBC. Badly done.
Since then P&P and Emma have remained my two absolute favorite Austens. Let me begin by saying that I know that people say that books don't work as movies, but I'm sorry, I think movies like P&P disprove that. So when I say that they took the book Emma and decided that Austen just wasn't 'snappy' enough for the screen so they'd just take the liberty of changing a whole bunch of dialogue... I hope you understand just how much I take that as an indication that they should never have been allowed to make the book into a movie in the first place. For the length this goes on, there is no excuse for it not to have been a highly faithful and well performed adaptation. Instead it is bits and bites of Austen with plenty of "well we'll just make this better for TV" dialogue smothering those bits and bites. Jane Austen's dialogue is what *makes* her stories. She was an incredible writer, and to have the guts of Emma torn out and replaced with someone else's writing is like saying "well we're going to be displaying the Mona Lisa next week, but first we're going to paint over it, maybe add some eyebrows and a real smile, you know?"
I managed to sit through the whole thing in the hopes I'd finally hit the point where Emma becomes charming, and Mr. Knightley becomes dashing, and Mr. Woodhouse becomes a dear (and lord, what an utter *waste* of getting Michael Gambon of all people to be in your movie!), and Frank Churchhill to become irresistibly casually flirtatious - but the characters were all ... very ... boring. There were a few tantalizing bits where I thought at least the Jane/Emma final scenes might be worth it but they were over almost as fast as they'd begun.
Honestly, this is only the second version of Emma I've ever seen. And since the first was the Gwyneth Paltrow version, I had absolutely no doubts that this version, longer *and* made by the BBC would blow it out of the water. But you know what? I think the Paltrow version actually had better casting, and kept *more* of Austen's dialogue in than this one. Badly done, BBC. Badly done.
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