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Small World, Bright Goddess Presiding
Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Greta Scacchi, Ewan McGregor, and Jeremy Northam; directed by Douglas McGrath
This is not the best of the Austen adaptations--that honor still belongs to Persuasion--but it holds its own, above all for an astonishing performance on the part of Paltrow. She has her accent nailed; she floats from intrigue to intrigue with the luminous ease of an angel, or an extraterrestrial. (Her sage, wide-apart blue eyes do vaguely recall those of Spielberg's E.T.) Paltrow shrewdly sparks the film's best laughs from her deadpan wonder at
McGrath nimbly distills Austen's words, and then finds a striking set of visual equivalents for them. The bright colors, which look moist to the touch; the fanciful, eerie, nearly sci-fi furniture--such as two fishbowls on impossibly high stilts--these combine with a playful compositional style and witty staging to make a virtue out of the film's chief limitation, which is its defiantly artificial atmosphere. This is not the early 1800s as they "must have been" (the great virtue of Persuasion)--this, in all its painterly, storybook radiance, is how Emma and her crowd see themselves: as visitors to a planet of wit and imagination. For an incandescent moment, so are we. -- F.X. Feeney (Rated PG for brief, mild language.) |
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