Emma (1996 with Kate Beckinsale)

Megan and her sister joined me for another great movie night at GFM. We made our choice from the variety of movies I brought with me from my Chick Flick DVD collection (just in case it is only the two of us again!!) I made my new favorite comfort food - a squash casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and cheddar cheese. Yum-o, as Rachel Ray would say. Thank goodness that I had some help eating up the Summer Squash that was overrunning my kitchen!

As for the movie, the girls chose to watch Emma with Kate Beckinsale (as opposed to the Gwyneth Paltrow version from the same year). It was quite fun since none of us had seen it before. We all agreed that Kate did a great job in the role and the other actors were well suited to the parts. I thought that Samantha Morton's odd beauty was a good fit as Harriot Smith and that the actor who played Jane (Olivia Williams) did a great job of putting together the complex level of emotions that role requires. She was also the right sort of quite beauty for that part. (I was trying to figure out where I'd seen her before - she is the love interest in Wes Anderson's movie Rushmore.) The character of Mrs. Elton was perfectly annoying and you wanted to smack her every time you saw her - the sign of a great acting job by Lucy Robinson!

(spoiler alert) The one thing about the story of Emma that is frustrating to me is the attraction to Mr. Knightly. He is a great man, but he keeps making very un-sexy references to having held Emma as a baby and talking about how they are not so much brother and sister. Eewww. Yuck. Stop talking about it or I can't handle the idea of you two together. He is also mean to her. Thank goodness she has a teachable heart and is willing to learn from his criticism of her. I'd probably tell him to go to Hell and wouldn't talk to him for months, but she just pouts a little and apologizes to whomever she has offended in the hopes that he'll like her again. Not my favorite of Ms. Austen's heroines.

One last note about this version, is it's accuracy. It has been a few years since I've read Emma, but this one is quite accurate to the story from what I can recall. It is always nice to see the effort put into making a film as accurate as possible in period dress, scenery and setting, as well as in the customs and dances of the time. This one was certainly up to the expected quality seen on BBC shows.