My picks. In chronological order. In bold are the ones I like the most.
Pride and Prejudice (1995) with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth
Sense and Sensibility (1995) with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet
Clueless (1995) with Alicia Silverstone
Persuasion (1995) with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds
Emma (1996) with Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong
Northanger Abbey (2007) with Felicity Jones
Love & Friendship (2016) with Kate Beckinsale
My list is pretty close to this, although I would say that every Austen adaptation has imperfections,--yes, even the 1995 P&P. Felicity Jones is probably the most perfect Catherine I can think of, but I was so disappointed by some of the other choices they made (e.g. burning Udolpho!). Have you seen the BBC adaptation of Mansfield Park from 1983? It has some amusingly primitive production values, but I think it is well worth seeing.
ReplyDeleteI watched Northanger Abbey a few years ago so can't remember it very well, I just remember liking it and Felicity Jones haha.
DeleteI haven't seen that version of Mansfield Park, only the dreadful 1999 one. Is it like the book? Enough for a fan of Mansfield Park? Because I think later versions try to make it "more exciting" and change the character of Fanny Price.
Yes, well, almost anything would be better than the 1999 MP. It's been about two years since I watched the 1983 version, so my memory is also not perfectly fresh, but I think it is one of the most faithful adaptations of any Austen book that I can remember seeing. There are a few character choices here and there that are a bit off, but not many (in fact there's really only one I can think of at the moment, involving Mr. Crawford and Maria). Fanny, and all the characters really, are wonderfully (surprisingly, delightfully) true to the book. Fanny does look a bit stouter/healthier than I think she ought, and the acting isn't always what I would call stellar, and the production values are sometimes laughably bad, but these are all things I can overlook. There are a few moments that are shot and acted with a...I'm not sure what to call it, a cinematic depth and power that I found moving and captivating.
DeleteIncidentally, the woman who played Fanny Price in 1983 later played Mrs. Allen opposite Felicity Jones in 2007.
DeleteBrian,
ReplyDeleteI've just looked at images. Doesn't Edmund look so old?
This version is a bit hard to find. Is it on BritBox?
Busyantine,
I haven't seen the whole adaptation, but I saw some clips. Elizabeth looks all right, I prefer Jennifer Ehle but this one has an interesting approach. I don't like the 1980 Darcy though.
It's hard to enjoy any other version after watching the 1995 one, I think.
Yes, Edmund seems a bit old, but his acting won me over. (Also, casting too-old actors is so common, e.g. Mr. Collins in 1995 seems about twice as old as he should be.) I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. I looked again now, and it's "currently unavailable," which is disappointing and typical of streaming services. There are individual episodes on youtube but I'm not sure if they're all there. It has been released on DVD--I see used copies on Amazon from $2.34, but it seems like the kind of thing library systems ought to have....
DeleteAmazon is also where I watched the 1980 P&P, which I thought was very stiff and formal--actually too reverent toward the text, putting too many of the narrator's lines into Elizabeth's mouth, which made Elizabeth almost omniscient. Darcy seemed like an automaton. He was more like Lord Orville from Evelina.
There was also a 1981 Sense and Sensibility which I found bizarre for the way it had characters sometimes talk over each other and occasionally yell at each other. OTOH all the Dashwood women wear mourning for at least six months, and Mrs. Dashwood for a full year, after the death of Mr. Dashwood, so props for historical accuracy.
I don't often buy DVDs or books because of house moving, so I guess I'll look for it somewhere else. But yeah, that's the trouble with streaming services.
DeleteI've seen 2 versions of Sense and Sensibility, and the 1995 version twice, so probably won't see more. The 1995 film is very good, but it also reminded me of why I hadn't reread the novel. I think there's a huge gap between it and Jane Austen's 4 major novels.
Yes, that seems to be a somewhat common feeling about S&S. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it. Personally, I like all six novels about equally, but all for different reasons.
DeleteThere's a bit in both the 1995 and 2008 versions of S&S that I find very...fascinating, and exemplary of adaptations in general. It's when Colonel Brandon rescues Marianne from the rain. The moment is dramatic and romantic, of course. It never happens in the book, and in fact Marianne is never caught out in the rain at the Palmers' house. She walks outside over the course of several "damp" evenings, becomes ill over the course of a few days, and is eventually persuaded to go to bed. But moviemakers seem allergic to understated realism. They must have dashing heroes rescuing damsels in distress. The problem is that that is exactly the kind of thing Austen was purposefully omitting from her books. If she had wanted to be a Gothic novelist, she could have done it easily, and then we would not be reading her.
(Yes, of course, Austen put in Willoughby's dramatic rescue of Marianne after she is caught in the rain and twists her ankle earlier in the book. But that is a deliberate and ironic reference to earlier novelistic conventions. So much of S&S, I think, is not-so-subtly engaging with earlier artistic and cultural ideas--the 18th-century cult of sensibility, the sentimental novel, etc.)
DeleteNow that I don't remember.
DeleteI was thinking, why are there two scenes of Marianne getting rescued in the rain?
Have you seen the trailer for the upcoming Persuasion from Netflix? I should blog about it but I'm lazy.
Haven't seen the trailer but have seen some still images from it. I'd love to hear your take.
DeleteHahahhaa I won't blog about it, so see this thread: https://twitter.com/nguyenhdi/status/1536746002350219264
DeleteAnd this: https://twitter.com/nguyenhdi/status/1536751757002416128
I also link to the trailer there.
DeleteNot on twitter so I'll just respond here. I liked this: "After the 2020 Emma, I'm not even mad anymore." Yep, that sums up how I feel pretty well. I'm not even going to watch the trailer. I don't need it in my head.
DeleteHahahhahaa. I'd venture to guess that it's even worse than you think.
DeletePeople have called it the Emma-ing (or Emmafying?), or Bridgertonification, or Fleabag-ing, of Persuasion.
Hmm, fleabagging. That doesn't make me want to see Fleabag
DeleteHahahhahaa.
DeleteI haven't seen it so I don't know what it means.
I can't claim to have seen many adaptations of Austen's work--certainly not enough to give me much choice in judging from among adaptations of any one novel. (I think I've seen only two Pride and Prejudice adaptations, at least leaving out what the Wikipedia article listing Austen adaptations calls "looser adaptations," and only remember the 2005 version well enough to compare it with the book, or with much of anything else.) Still, I'm struck by how the top five are all from a single two year period--1995-1996--which seems an extraordinary concentration; and, as I'm old enough to recall, was the time of the great mid-'90s boom in Austen-based productions, which was sufficiently large that Sense and Sensibility (along with the Merchant-Ivory Howard's End) was a byword for "highbrow" cinema, and people who ordinarily pay no attention to Austen whatsoever noticed. (Indeed, when Jim Abrahams of Airplane fame did a spoof of Mafia films in the late '90s, they titled it "Jane Austen's Mafia," for just that reason.)
ReplyDeleteAny thoughts about that particular period as a particularly good one where quality adaptation is concerned? And, perhaps, whether there have been any changes in film that make a good adaptation of an Austen novel more difficult to make today? (For instance, the impulse to "Fleabagification" that came up earlier in this thread?)
The 90s were definitely a good decade for Jane Austen adaptations, and for some reason they were concentrated in 1995-1996 though I don't really know why.
DeleteThe 90s also had a few big Shakespeare films, like Much Ado About Nothing, 2 versions of Hamlet, Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night... And if Jane Austen's got Clueless, Shakespeare also got a few high school adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You.
You're right about the Merchant-Ivory films, though I don't like their films all that much.
As for your last question, I'm going to have to think, but my impression is that apart from Mansfield Park perhaps, all of her novels have got a good, faithful, even definitive adaptation, so now when they try to squeeze more money out of her, they feel the need to do something wacky, or "witty and subversive" as they say. I have doubt that there can be a good adaptation of Mansfield Park in this day and age though, because they would want to modernise it and change the character of Fanny Price, the way Netflix has to change Anne Elliot into one of those Strong Female Characters or Kick-Ass Girls. Fanny Price and Anne Elliot don't fit that trope.
I don't really want to make broad generalisations about modern films or modern film adaptations, as I don't watch that many of them. But I can see that in the case of the 2020 Emma and Rebecca, the filmmakers make the female character stronger and give them the better lines, and make the male characters weaker, which changes the dynamics and in both cases ruins the story.
At the same time, there are still good adaptations out there, such as the 2019 Little Women, though I may not be a good judge as I haven't read the novel. I judge it for itself, and judge it against the 1994 film.
The impulse to modernize seems important-partly to meet certain political standards, but also because filmmakers are attempting to appeal to a modern audience which, I find, is historically and socially literate. I find myself thinking, for example, of how in my edition of Austen's book the family's panic after Lydia went off with Wickham ran for about fifty pages--nearly a seventh of the text--and was extremely compressed in, at least, the 2005 film. The desire to focus on Elizabeth apart, I suspect this was partly a matter of a sense that a contemporary audience wouldn't "get" just how big a potential disaster for the family this whole episode was.
DeleteThat should have read "historically and socially illiterate." Sorry about that.
DeleteI don't really remember the 2005 film because I saw it years ago, before reading the book. But that sounds right.
DeleteIt's different, but it makes me think of the scene where Emma embarrasses Miss Bates at the picnic. The 2020 film replaced it with a meaner line, as though they thought Emma's line wasn't bad enough (and the audience wouldn't get it), and Emma just became more of a bitch.
The impulse to modernize seems important-partly to meet certain political standards, but also because filmmakers are attempting to appeal to a modern audience which, I find, is historically and socially literate. I find myself thinking, for example, of how in my edition of Austen's book the family's panic after Lydia went off with Wickham ran for about fifty pages--nearly a seventh of the text--and was extremely compressed in, at least, the 2005 film. The desire to focus on Elizabeth apart, I suspect this was partly a matter of a sense that a contemporary audience wouldn't "get" just how big a potential disaster for the family this whole episode was.
ReplyDeleteHi, I just want to put in a good word for 1996's other Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow's. It's a fair adaptation that gets a lot of the real Austen spirit right; and it has a soft cinematographic look that draws me in as none of the other Austen films from that era do. Toni Collette is the perfect Harriet.
ReplyDeleteI strongly disagree.
DeleteI think Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma is not at all Jane Austen's Emma. She is catty, bitchy, two-faced, mean, there's even a random shot of her taking down a painting of Harriet and replacing it with a painting of a dog, for no reason. Emma is meant to be lovable, she messes up everything out of kindness. Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma is a bitch.
The one that gets the spirit right is the version with Kate Beckinsale. Even Clueless is closer to the essence of Jane Austen's novel.
As for Toni Collette, it's probably subjective, I personally find her performance too comic and too exaggerated. Harriet is naive and impressionable, not a clown.
Jane Austen's Emma is frequently cruel. Is she a bitch? I'd rather say she was . . . clueless. Gwyneth's performance captures that nicely. She takes down the portrait of Harriet (in her own room) when her own actions have made the very thought of Harriet mortifying to her. The doggy picture is a joke that nips Emma herself.
ReplyDeleteAll the performances are comic (and well modulated, I believe); it's right that they should be comic: this is the dramatic (and cinematic) equivalent of what Austen achieves by her mastery of authorial tone -- a resource not available to film. The added business, such as the picture-switching, serves the same purpose. There is no getting around that theatrical means, whether stage or screen, are not literary means: the theatrical is more robust; and if an attempt is made to stifle that robustness, instead of coming nearer to the literary source, they sink beneath it. The result is then the drab grey British products of the '90s.
Not visually drab and grey, however. The films are almost desprately opulent. They seem to be trying to overwhelm us with cotume and decor and acreage. Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma and Whit Stillman's Love and Friendship are the only Jane Austen films I can feast my eyes on with real pleasure. Oh! and MGM's black-and-white Pride and Prejudice from the 1940s -- which has practically nothing to do with Jane Austen, but is enjoyable in its own right.
Again, I don't agree.
DeleteEmma can be unkind, but never malicious. And she has self-reflection. That's the thing that groups her together with Elizabeth Bennet and other Jane Austen heroines but apart from the "bad women" such as Mary Crawford. She has conscience, she has reflection, and she can improve herself.
Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma is, as I said, catty, two-faced, and often malicious. That's not the character Jane Austen wrote.
As for production design, I'd rather see something that is "visually drab and grey" but gets the characters right and the spirit of the book, than something that looks good but gets everything wrong. And the Gwyneth Paltrow film gets everything wrong, even Mr Knightley.
This is why I think Clueless is brilliant, because they get it right: the character makes lots of mistakes because she's naive and clueless, but she's never cruel or malicious.
DeleteI don't feel a great gulf between Jane Austen's characterization of Emma and Gwyneth Paltrow's. What differences there are fall within the tolerance of what I'd call an adaptation. It's an interpretation. Evokes what I like about the book, while no less it has a life of its own. When I watch it again, as I surely will someday, I'll think of your objections, no doubt, but my enjoyment of the film will continue the same.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen other versions of Emma?
DeleteJust the two 1996 movies, and Clueless, to stretch a point.
ReplyDeleteUpdate on the 1983 Mansfield Park. I splurged a little and bought it, and just watched the first episode. I think I may have oversold it just a wee bit. It really, really has that old-timey BBC awkwardness. Much of it is really quite painful to watch. Terrible sound, some incredibly bad, or at least very stiff, acting (many of the actors seem to have gone to the "declamatory" school of stage acting), long takes...etc. And I think I have to take back what I said about Edmund being a good actor. But I still think that if one can get past all this, there are some rewards. It is very faithful to the book--I still think it's one of the most faithful I've seen. It has enough time and patience to show the way the "family dynamics" at Mansfield Park work. It has a few spot-on performances, like Sir Thomas and Fanny's father. It has a few scenes that have stuck in my memory as being kind of powerful, for example a scene in Portsmouth with Fanny sitting in the dim, cramped, low-ceilinged kitchen with her family, and her father being his usual outrageous, drunken self, and her mother not even registering his behavior. Some of the conversations between Edmund and Fanny are also good. Probably this adaptation's handful of strengths made it resolve in my memory into something better than it is.
ReplyDeleteHahahahhaaha.
DeleteI think I'll stick to the book lol.
(Speaking of Shakespeare adaptations in the 90s, the actor who played Edmund in 1983 played Horatio in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, and also appeared in a bunch of other Shakespeare movies around then.)
DeleteSticking to the book is probably always the right answer.
DeleteI see, and haha.
Delete