According to a midrash (a rabbinic legend), a woman once asked a rabbi: “It took God six days to create the world. What has he been doing since then?”
“The Holy One, blessed be he,” the rabbi responded, “has been sitting and making matches.”
If we feel that playing matchmaker is akin to playing God — the audacity of trying to fix two people up! — we’re not alone. The rabbis of antiquity recognized this feeling too. What right do we have to do such a thing? We would have to have such an intimate knowledge of the potential partners that the task only seems fit for the almighty. And even he struggles: Another rabbinic legend states that bringing two human beings together is as difficult for God as splitting the Red Sea.
Emma Woodhouse, the most famous matchmaker of all in literature, does not appear to share these concerns. “Emma,” as Autumn de Wilde’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma begins, is “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition.” When a young woman is smiled upon by fate like this, why should she not attempt to play God, or at least matchmaker, for her best friend?
Emma’s fumbling forays in the art of the fix-up are the subject of Austen’s great novel, first published in 1815 and endlessly adapted ever since — 10 times for television, four for film, and more than can be counted for the stage. De Wilde’s version is the first since Aisha (2010), which adapted the story into a contemporary Indian rom-com, and the best since Clueless in 1995. The film is so skillfully rendered, from the felicitous casting to the unobtrusive camerawork to the sumptuous set and costume design, that it is hard to believe this is de Wilde’s first feature film.
Previously known for her rock photography and music videos, de Wilde, 49, clearly has great respect for her source material. But perhaps more importantly, she’s not imprisoned by it. Previous adaptations of Emma, such as Douglas McGrath’s 1996 film and the BBC’s 2009 miniseries, have been a touch too staid and stately — full of ornate furniture, genteel chamber music, and crackling fireplaces but lacking in the fun present in Austen’s novels. De Wilde’s Emma allows the more playful and comic aspects of Austen’s novel to shine through. It is still a faithful and accurate adaptation that is set, like the novel, in the 19th-century English countryside, but it is one that feels freer than many other period pieces.
De Wilde’s Emma also has at its center a slightly freer and less constrained Emma. Emma is not supposed to be a particularly likable character, at least not at the outset. Austen believed Emma would be “a character whom no one but me will much like.” With the notable exception of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, previous performances of Emma, such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s and Romola Garai’s, played her too sympathetically, striving to make her likable instead of portraying her as Austen did: vain, vainglorious, presumptuous, frequently too clever for her own good, and blind to her and others’ best interests for the greater part of the story. Emma’s most glaring flaw, Austen wrote, is her “disposition to think a little too well of herself,” a disposition that leading woman Anya Taylor-Joy brings out with great skill. Taylor-Joy’s Emma is judgmental, immodest, and frequently snobbish. In other words, she is Emma as Emma is meant to be played.
In terms of dialogue, Emma might be Austen’s cleverest and most sophisticated novel, and the quick, sharp-witted speech of her characters sparkles here, thanks in large part to Eleanor Catton’s crisp screenplay and Johnny Flynn’s superb performance as Mr. Knightley, the Woodhouse family’s close friend and Emma’s eventual romantic interest. It doesn’t hurt his cause that he looks like Robert Redford circa 1975.
One of the great turning points of the novel comes when Emma decides to give up on matchmaking after her attempts to set up her friend Harriet go horribly wrong. “The first error,” Austen wrote, “and the worst, lay at her door. It was foolish, it was wrong, to take so active a part in bringing any two people together. It was adventuring too far, assuming too much, making light of what ought to be serious — a trick of what ought to be simple. She was quite concerned and ashamed, and resolved to do such things no more.”
Yet Emma never quite relinquishes her belief that “a good match” is the key to happiness — a belief that is shared by many of the world’s great religions and by the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which our (and Austen’s) culture has been built. Judaism and Christianity have long maintained that the logical and best conclusion of a romance is not a short-term hookup but a covenantal marriage. The filmmakers appear to hint at these religious undertones by sprinkling the film with Christian music and by having Elton, the local vicar, recite a line of dialogue that does not appear in Austen’s novel, referring to marriage as “holy matrimony, an honorable estate instituted by God in man’s great innocence.” Emma initially desires the independence and freedom of an unmarried life, but she eventually chooses committed love. This choice, Catton and de Wilde seem to be saying, is not only romantic but also religious. Pope John Paul II, who, when he was still Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, wrote that “man longs for love more than freedom,” would very likely agree.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
