Emma

Jane Austen’s other comedic romances take place in the context of family. The hot-and-cold relationship of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy is influenced by the interests of Elizabeth’s parents and the courtships of her sisters; Sense and Sensibility hinges on the contrasting approaches to love of sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, and the family dynamics that make their financial situation precarious. The would-be matchmaker Emma Woodhouse, though, lives alone with her widowed father and has no worries about money. Emma is in many ways about a broader sort of family: the small town where everyone knows, and is involved with, everyone else’s business. Fedo’s charming adaptation emphasizes this aspect of Austen’s tale. His characters narrate their own story in the third person, using Austen’s prose. When Jenny Connell’s Emma talks about herself at length, it feels like soliloquy, but when the narration is spread out, and Mrs. Goddard chimes in with a line about Mrs. Elton, or Mrs. Weston pipes up to say something omniscient about Jane Fairfax, it takes on the quality of small-town gossip.

Fedo has done an admirable job of streamlining Austen’s novel, but some characters are shortchanged (we don’t get to see enough of Jane and Frank Churchill, for instance, to suspect their relationship or to really believe it once revealed). The ensemble is almost uniformly excellent, but there’s something nagging about Connell’s intelligent portrayal of the title character; if anything, this Emma seems too practical to have caused all this trouble in the first place.—Kris Vire