HEAVY MEDDLE

JANE AUSTEN'S CLUELESS GAL IS BACK IN A DEFT 'EMMA'


Review by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The book's author was devoted to her home in Hampshire, the
action was filmed around Dorset, and nearly all the actors
are English. But EMMA (Miramax, PG), the latest film
adaptation of a work by that hot early-19th-century Hollywood
property Jane Austen, is a most American movie. And it's easy
to see why Team USA filmmakers--first Amy Heckerling, with her
winning 1995 Valley Girl update, Clueless, and now writer and
first-time director Douglas McGrath--are attracted to this
particular masterpiece: Austen's happiest and best-known
romantic comedy is also the one best suited to the American
way of quality drama. Emma is satiric without the shadows of
Persuasion, and witty without the subtler, very British class-
conscious gibes of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and
Sensibility. No wonder Miramax hopes you'll be put in mind of
Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Well, McGrath--best known as a humor writer and as co-
screenwriter of Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway--doesn't
have the heady touch of Four Weddings director Mike Newell;
there are no giggles in this pastoral diversion. But the
director is practical Yank enough to employ a straightforward,
happy-all-the-time approach to the story--as well as to make
use of local It girl of the hour Gwyneth Paltrow in the title
role. Paltrow has done plenty of apprentice work before, most
recently in Seven and The Pallbearer; but in her first starring
role, her signature style of youthful country freshness and
city-chick sophistication are used to good advantage to create
a heroine clever enough to strategize about the matrimonial
welfare of others, but blind to her own romantic happiness.

Perhaps the highest praise that can be given Paltrow is that
there are no appreciable performance gaps between her green
talents and the rest of the truly top-drawer cast. If Toni
Collette (Muriel's Wedding), Greta Scacchi (The Player), Alan
Cumming (Circle of Friends), Polly Walker (Enchanted April),
Jeremy Northam (The Net), and, in particular, Sophie Thompson
(Four Weddings) and the always glorious Juliet Stevenson (Truly,
Madly, Deeply) do not completely steal the show, it is because
they are either gracious enough or have been underdirected
enough to hold back. And even so, Thompson, as the garrulous,
good-hearted spinster Miss Bates, and Stevenson, as the self-
satisfied social climber Mrs. Elton, manage to create full
portraits of sketch characters amid the many light sketches of
what could have been richly painted principals. McGrath's Emma
is a sunny tea party--which is lovely, unless you know that Jane
Austen served a full banquet.

Grade:  B

--Lisa Schwarzbaum