The Comic Turn in Period Dramas: A Review of Autumn de Wilde’s Emma
Whenever I teach Jane Austen’s Persuasion, I ask students on our first day of discussing the novel to describe Austen’s writing style in one word. Even though the narrator skewers Sir Walter Elliot’s vanity and social pretensions on the first page, “romantic” is usually the top response. Rarely does anyone describe her as “comic.” The exercise usefully exposes the degree to which film adaptations of Austen’s novels have colored the way students read her books as only about passionate love, blind to her biting social satire.
Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in Pride and Prejudice (2005)
The culprits are numerous. Chief among them is the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley. It’s almost impossible to forgive director Joe Wright for transforming Mr. Darcy’s disastrous first proposal of marriage to Elizabeth Bennet in the parlor of the Collins’s home into a brooding encounter in the rain, or for the invented scene at the end of the film where Darcy whispers to Elizabeth, “you have bewitched me body and soul.” Though superior adaptations in many ways, the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice and Ang Lee’s award-winning Sense and Sensibility from the same year are equally to blame and seem to have set a dubious precedent for later adaptations of Austen. Though Sense and Sensibility is much wittier than the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee revealed that he was aiming at creating a sentimental tearjerker when he commented, “I want to break people’s hearts so badly that they’ll still be recovering from it two months later.” Austen scholar Paula Byrne hit the mark in her criticism of the film:
Lee missed the most crucial point of the novel: that Sense and Sensibility is a satire of sensibility, not an endorsement of it. Austen set out to deflate the conventions of the 18th century novel: she is defiantly anti-romantic, realistic, and clear-eyed, parodying the absurd excesses of the popular sentimental fiction of the day.
And of course, the 1995 Pride and Prejudice is mainly remembered for the “legendary sex appeal” of Colin Firth, who (in a scene that never happened in the novel) dives into a lake on his estate and emerges dripping wet in a white shirt. The “wet shirt scene” became so famous that it was voted “the most memorable moment in a British TV drama” and is now immortalized in a 12-foot fiberglass statue of Colin Firth. If we wanted to trace all the way back to the origin of the problem, we could go as far back as the 1940 Gone with the Wind-esque Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, or the BBC’s Northanger Abbey from 1986, an adaptation so misguided that it believes Austen wrote a gothic novel rather than a satire of gothic novels.
This is why I was optimistic when I saw the trailer for this year’s adaptation of Emma. Not only did it look beautifully filmed, but it looked funny in a fresh, surprising way. Here at last, I thought, is further evidence that we are experiencing a much needed turn from the period drama to the period comedy. But Emma will not be marked as an important breakthrough in the shift to comic period films. Despite some fine comic performances, its attempt at humor fell flat.
As a satirist, Austen exposes the follies, vices, affectations, and other shortcomings of her characters to laughter. The best expression of Austen’s moral purpose as a satirist comes from Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice when she says, “I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” Because satire often aims at correction, Austen’s heroes and heroines often have to learn how they’ve fallen short. For instance, Elizabeth Bennet laments the discovery of her own vanity—“How despicably I have acted! . . . I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! . . . Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly”—and Anne Elliot must admit that “She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! alas! she must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.” In de Wilde’s Emma, Bill Nighy’s portrayal of Emma’s hypochondriac father works because it cleverly responds to how Austen uses satire. Unlike all other adaptations of Emma, Nighy’s Mr. Woodhouse is not a frail invalid. Instead, he gives us a spry Mr. Woodhouse, who is most lively and active when protecting himself from anything that might make him sick. The incongruity between Mr. Woodhouse’s perceived state of health and his actual health is deliciously ironic and worthy of Austen’s sense of humor. This version of Emma also highlights to a greater extent than most other films Mr. Elton’s profession as a clergyman of the Church of England, which sharpens the contrast between his profession and his worldly ambition, vanity, and pusillanimity.
Where the comedy of Emma works less well is when the film departs from Austen’s satiric intent and includes jarring moments of bodily humor: Emma raising her skirt to warm her backside by the fire, Mr. Knightley’s standing nude as his valet helps him dress, Emma’s nose bleeding while Mr. Knightley proposes to her. This is not a harkening back to Jonathan Swift’s use of scatological humor in Gulliver’s Travels, The Lady’s Dressing Room, and A Description of a City Shower, in which Swift strips away man’s prideful pretensions to grandeur and exposes our base animal natures. Instead, it’s something far less pointed. Of the decision to film Mr. Knightley nude in his first scene de Wilde said in an interview, “Mr Knightley is a real mansplainer at the beginning of the film . . . So I really wanted people to fall in love with Mr Knightley, and I thought stripping him down to the bare human was a really nice way to literally humanise Mr Knightley.” Similarly, Emma’s nosebleed was meant to make the pair more accessible to a modern audience. De Wilde herself experiences stress-induced nosebleeds, and so she thought it would be a good way to humanize the couple.
De Wilde’s Emma has rightly been called a “Millennial” adaptation, because comedy comes in the service of making the past more “relatable,” the same word de Wilde used to describe the plot of Austen’s novel. In a piece for The New Yorker published back in 2014 called “The Scourge of Relatability,” Rebecca Mead examines how we have increasingly come to value literature, film, and television for its “relatability.” The word “relatable” did not take on its contemporary meaning as a quality “to describe a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected” until about a decade ago. It is not as if we have never sought, in the past, to see ourselves reflected in works of art or that this is not a valid way to respond to what we read or see, she says,
but to demand that a work be ‘relatable’ expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play . . . the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.
In Emma, we see how the desire that stories be relatable not only colors audience response but has also come to inform the artistic vision of writers. Emma is not a perfectly poised gentlewoman, taking turns in the garden and demurely sipping tea, but is just like us, chilling in her yoga pants and watching Netflix. And ultimately, it is this focus on the relatability of the characters that makes de Wilde’s comedy so different from Austen’s: unlike Austen, de Wilde uses comedy not to laugh us, or her characters, into better behavior but to reassure us that it’s OK to be a little bit of “a hot mess.”
