Anthony Lane on movies that thin out great books
In particular movies of Jane Austen novels
Now a staff writer for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane was one of the magazine’s film critics from 1993 to 2024. His insight into movies is taken from his review of the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma, published in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect.
Lane argues that the film was “miscast right across the board.” Jeremy Northam was much too young for Mr. Knightley, “who ought to be openly middle-aged . . . and avuncular in his attentions right up to the fourth quarter.” Paltrow can’t convey Emma’s “moral bossiness . . . . when natural solicitude shades into an unnatural desire to make short stories out of your friends,” making her nearly “vicious and manipulative to her friends.”
It could be argued that people who have never read the fiction — the majority of the target audience — will not be bothered by the rights and wrongs of the cast, having nothing to compare it with. But it’s worth being picky on their behalf, because they will be denied the available pleasures of the story, and will almost certainly catch a whiff of something rotten.
To them, Knightley will so obviously be Emma’s main man from the start that the eventual yielding of her heart will seem long overdue; whereas it should come as a genuine tremor, to us as much as to Emma herself. It is not that McGrath’s movie makes no sense but that it makes such easy, do-it-yourself sense that you leave the cinema untested and unsurprised — entertained, for sure, but given little inkling of why this Austen dame was so special.
The film of Sense and Sensibility was reduced, after a couple of viewings, to a similar thinness — to the pleasant sensation of romance. Cinema might fancy that it has trapped Jane Austen where it wants her, but she has got away again.
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