GWYNETH
After Emma, Great Expectations

(By Bob Strauss)


Jane Austen's novels have attracted the most unlikely movie bedfellows.
From Taiwan's Ang Lee, who directed Sense and Sensibility, to New York
by way of Beverly Hills Amy Heckerling, who created the Emma update
Clueless, filmmakers have been cozing up to the early- 19th-century
English novelist.

With good reason. Austen's romantic comedies of manners are fun as
well as fancy-dress affairs-something that could not always be said of
their immediate cine- matic forebears, the Merchant-Ivory productions
of Howard's End and The Remains of the Day. They're also free:
Austen's books long ago passed into the public domain. Most attractive
of all, from a Hollywood standpoint, they come with a classy literary
pedigree yet have relatively wide audience appeal.

The latest pair to cinematically fall under Austen's spell are actress
Gwyneth Paltrow and screenwriter director Douglas McGrath. A New York-
L.A. show-biz baby and Texas- bred humorist, respectively, Paltrow and
McGrath pulled off a full-dress, period-set Emma that played every bit
as British as the recent film version of Persuasion and the Pride and
Prejudice TV miniseries.

"It was certainly challenging," says Paltrow, 24, who became famous as
the know-nothing know-it-all Emma Wood- house, after years in the
shadow of her actress mom, Blythe Danner; her TV producer father,
Bruce Paltrow and her superstar boyfriend (now fiance), Brad Pitt.
"But I loved Emma immediately. I loved how spirited she was, how she
had a very good heart, and I loved that she's faulty and a little
misguided. I found that very human and real, and I was excited to play
her.

"Then, of course, came all the work," Paltrow adds, her smile turing
to a wince. "The dialect, the horses, dancing, archery, and singing,
and the manners. It required a lot of research beforehand. Luckily,
before I went over to England I was recovering from wisdom tooth
surgery, so I had a lot of time on my hands."

"I knew one good reason to settle on Gwyneth was that she could do
whatever you give her," says McGrath, the oscar- nominated
screenwriter (Bullets Over Broadway) and former writer for the New
Republic and Saturday Night Live, who made his directing debut with
Emma. "I had seen her in Flesh and Bone, and she does the most
incredible accent in that film. I grew up in Midland, Texas, and my
friends and I used to go to the movies and just kill ourselves
laughing whenever someone tried to do a Texas accent. But Gwyneth's
was perfect-it's not only Texas, it's regional Texas! She sounded
just like girls I grew up with. Once I heard that, I knew she had a
phenomenal ear."

But it was more than just her facility with dialects that made
Paltrow the perfect Emma. Jermey Northam, the classically trained
British actor who plays Emma's dis- approving yet adoring Mr.
Knightley, saw in Paltrow's American humor a zest that gave wings
to Austen's rich dialogue.

"It's easy to praise Gwyneth for just getting the accent right,"
Northam says. "But the language also poss- esses a rhetoric that we
don't have anymore-the pauses, the parentheses-and she can relish
those with her sense of mischief and fun. She's also technically
brilliant, a great comedian, and she's wonderful to play with, full
of lovely, deft touches."

"She's actually how I pictured the part looking, too, " McGrath
says. "Those beautiful patrician lines, her color- ing . You know,
Austen doesn't give you a lot of descript- ion about how the
characters look, so you pretty much put it together your own way."

That disdain for voluminous description, so rare among English
writers of Austen's century, is one of the things that both Paltrow
and McGrath feel makes her work so easily adaptable to modern
American sensibilites.

"I'm not a huge Jane Austen fan," Paltrow admits. "I find her a
little too chatty. But I think it translates well because it's
about story-plot and circumstance and confusion, and love and wit
and romance. That's why her novels make such lovely films."

McGrath found it easy to adapt Austen's text to the screen. "Austen
tells the story through the dialogue. I had to make very few
adjustments with that. I just had to move a few conversations
around and bring out some of the internal parts of the book.
Adaptations are about picking up a voice and understanding it, then
bringing your own perspective to it."

Emma, a character- and dialogue- driven film, was "shot fairly
simply, because the story's simple," McGrath says. "It's nice if
you're not aware of the camera, but it makes you feel what the
scene needs to feel. If that means standing still, I don't mind the
camera's being still."

The character's richness compensateed for the plot, which is thin in
today's screenwriting terms. "It was so delightful to have a heroine
who was completely wrong and ill informed about everything she was
doing, causing all the trouble, being the most inept matchmaker in
the world," he adds. "When you find out it's because she's never
been in love herself, it gives you two nice strands that arc through
the story. There's a nice little social comedy, and then it deepens
into something more romantic and poignant."

The very human comedy exemplified Jane Austen may not be gracing
movie screens for much longer. Austen wrote only six novels, so
she's about "filmed out" (there's even a British TV Emma, making
for three filmed versions in less than two years). Hollywood has
yet to find another 19th-century author who approaches her
ingratiating, beguiling tone, and filmmakers are running out of
other literary novels to turn into movies or multipart television
shows. Thomas Hardy is too grim; Jude was well made but completely
dreary. And Jane's Campion's bizarre adaptation of Henry James's The
Portrait of a Lady dashed any hopes that the great chronicler of
clashes between European and American sensibilities will be big box
office anytime soon.

Of course, there's always Dickens, and lots of it. In fact, Paltrow
has just finished making a movie adaptation of Great Expectations.
(Like Clueless, it's set in con- temporary times.) And whatever well-
meaning, egocentric Emma Woodhouse's faults may have been, she is
much easier to like than the man-eating Estella of Great Expectations.

"She is a nasty, nasty piece of work," Paltrow says of the woman she
plays in Great Expectations, which co-stars Robert De Niro, Ethan
Hawke, and Anne Bancroft. "But she, too, is a product of her
circumstances, raised by this insane woman who hated men and brought
her little girl up to manipulate men and use them in a bad way. She's
pretty evil, and it was fun to play, but she comes around in the end."

Paltrow's role in Kilronan, an upcoming suspense thriller, provides an
even greater leap from Austen gaiety. She portrays an innocent young
bride tormented by her murderous mother-in-law. Jessica Lange will
co-star.

For Paltrow, Emma's acclaim means that she has even more opportunity
to pursue her artistic agenda, which is to constantly take on different
and unusual parts. She recently received glowing notices for her
depiction of a self-destructive Reno hooker in Hard Eight. And she
plans to go from classical to postmodern with her next several films:
Sliding Doors, which speculates on the role of chance in examining a
woman's life, and Duets, a three- story film set in and around a
karaoke bar, to be made with Brad (Pitt, as her leading man) and Dad
(her father, as the director).

Movie success at a young age isn't a nonstop tea party. Paltrow knew
from observing her parents that it involves long hours and hard work.
And she has suffered the outrage- ous press intrusions-long-lens shots
of her and Pitt sun- bathing on secluded beaches are typical-that go
with dating an actor who has been dubbed the sexiest man alive.

"My parents worry sometimes that I might need to slow down," she
admits. "But they're incredibly proud. And the way they raised me
always was with such love and support. Because of that, I don't place
too much stock in Hollywood or what people think of me. It's all
fleeting, and you never know when everybody is going to turn on you.
If I just stay the way they raised me, then I'll be able to sail
through it without any real heartbreak.

"My parents showed me, by example, that family is what's important
in life," she continues. "And that's something I can share with Brad.
One of the wonderful things about being with him is that, whatever I'm
going through now as I become better known, he's already been through
all of it. He's very grounding in that way. He is a very centered
person, and he shares that."

There are moments, though, when life in Austen's 19th- century Surrey
countryside looks more attractive than living in the modern fishbowl.

"If I could live back then, with no press helicopters, without Hard
Copy, without the National Enquirer, I would have been a very happy
girl," she says with a laugh. But Paltrow seems happy anyway,
especially now that Pitt has popped the question.

"I'm over the moon. Mmmm," she admits, persuasively.

She's trying to remain unfazed by her recent success. "I just go
into everything with an open mind as I possibly can," Paltrow says.
"I try to take everything as a learning experience and hope that I
come out of it a better actress. I never have expectations, and I
have to ignore the buzz. You can't take all that seriously."

One thing she is serious about, however, is everything Emma means
to her.

"Oh gosh, it's a very important film," Paltrow says. "It certainly
defined certain things about me or what I'm capable of, at least in
other people's minds. That's really nice, and it's just a sweet,
sweet movie that I'm very proud."