Emma 2009

Emma is one of the greatest stories of an individual realizing their own privilege that has ever been committed to the page or to the screen. The scene where Knightley dresses Emma down, admits that Miss Bates has her faults, but that it's horribly unfair of Emma to take liberties with her given the differences in their station is as sharp and meaningful a scene as any. That's when the scales fall, when Emma, who had been so oblivious, her lesser impulses brought out by a caddish, misbehaving Frank Churchill, sees how cruel she had been, realizes the kind of pain she'd inflicted on Miss Bates, a woman who, while a bit of a pill, has never been anything but gracious and kind and overflowing with gratitude for any and every kindness shown her.

Emma's deep contrition, devastation even, at all the ways she failed to live up to the standard, at how her inability to see events from another's perspective have led her down a path to saying such an unkind word to someone so unduly and so hurtfully (Tasmin Greg's reaction is perfect), is a marked turn. It motivates everything that comes after, and symbolizes the comfortable cocoon she's been living in.

And yet at the end, she makes a change, in herself and in how she treats others, attempting to make amends with the people she's wronged, and she breaks out of that cocoon.

At the beginning of the episode, I complained to my wife that Michael Gambon was a pretty big get for a role where all they asked him to do was doddle around and worry, as amusing as it is. And then, here, he has two scenes where he absolutely knocks it out of the park. Early on where he says that he's a fool, but that he knows all too well how the unexpected can come and take away the things one loves most, it's an intensely sad but sweet scene that explores the sadness and motivation of Mr. Woodhouse extraordinarily well in the subtext there (dare I say, better than the source material) and has a supreme sweetness in how Emma reassures him that he and Isabella were always grateful that they had him even after their mother passed.

Then, at the end of the episode, where he lets go of his darling Emma so that she can go on her honeymoon, sending his last daughter out into the world and letting her take a few steps toward independence and something beyond the garden gate, it's also a very touching moment, where Gambon conveys the difficulty and the love and the half-denial that it's even happening that pervades Mr. Woodhouse's visage. Gambon is far from wasted, and the adaptation saved his best moments for the climax.

That said, it's also a pretty hilarious episode. The quick cuts to the various parties learning of Mrs. Churchill's death, and responding with knee-jerk joy and then sudden forced solemnity was a great, well-edited sequence. By the same token, Emma bursting into Knightley's room, declaring that she'll always love him but that they can never be together and that's all, and then storming out (the implication being that she can't abandon her father), is pretty hilarious in its own right. Even the picnic scene, which moves around much more heavy machinery in terms of plot and character development, has a certain cringe comedy factory that wouldn't feel out of place with awkward gatherings on The Office (British or American).

Then, of course, there's the love story. Maybe I'm just a sap, but the set up of both Knightley and Emma fearing the worst about the other's affections, and then finding out that they feel the same way about each other is an absolutely heartening, even triumphant scene. To see their friendship, which has been nicely developed over the course of the mini-series, culminate there, with professions of love and each of them in a place where they've more than earned it, feels right and heartwarming.

And the final scene, where Emma finally sees the world beyond Highbury, that stands in not just for her seeing the sea for the first time, but taking a step forward, growing as a person and seeing the world that exists beyond her own perspective, is an incredibly uplifting and meaningful way to convey the development of Emma as a person and as a character. I've had my ups and downs with this adaptation, but it absolutely captures the spirit of the novel it takes its story from, and beyond the beautiful images that it puts on the screen, it communicates who Emma was, who Emma is, and who she may one day be, and the loving-if-enabling ecosystem she emerges from, and created a moving, worthwhile piece of art in its own right.