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Small World, Bright Goddess Presiding

Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Greta Scacchi, Ewan McGregor, and Jeremy Northam; directed by Douglas McGrath

That madly spinning blue globe we see sparkling in deep space as the titles roll says everything about the dry, sidelong, merry nature of what's to follow. The instant the little world slows enough to reveal itself as a map of the Earth, we also discover it shows only one country, England, and (apart from a place called London) one town--Highbury. We then cut to a painted blue ornament dangling from a ribbon, held aloft by its maker, Emma Woodhouse ( Gwyneth Paltrow )--a twenty-two-year-old "single woman of means" who has no personal desire to marry but feels no restraint at meddling in the affairs of everyone around her.

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A small world with a bright goddess presiding: welcome to the universe of Jane Austen. This ingenious novelist has been adapted with a nearly monotonous excellence, three times in the past year alone. There's been Persuasion , the deepest and grittiest of the lot; Sense and Sensibility , the satiny, impeccably witty Oscar winner ; and Clueless , a freewheeling, inspired modern adaptation of--oops--Emma. One might well ask, why another? But first-time director Douglas McGrath (who also adapted the script) charges in with such contagious energy and confidence that, like the spinning globe in the credits, the little world he creates stands apart from every one of its neighbors.

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 80 the world's foolishness. She is also buoyed by a gourmet supporting cast: Greta Scacchi, Polly Walker, Sophie Thompson (sister of that other Emma ), Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding), and Ewan McGregor ( Trainspotting ). Finally, there's Jeremy Northam, who is particularly suave as Mr. Knightley, the one man with whom Emma might find happiness--if only she can pull her nose out of other people's romances long enough to see him plain.

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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