Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29511 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-08-24
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Original recording remastered, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 270 minutes

Amazon.com
The key to any Jane Austen adaptation is finding the perfect balance of romantic yearning and savage, satirical wit. Austen's Emma has these two qualities at their most exquisite and tantalizing, and this BBC adaptation from 1972 serves the novel with complete satisfaction. Delightful Doran Godwin captures not only the title character's good nature and resilient will, but also her exasperating self-satisfaction and ungovernable manipulative impulses. Believing herself to be acting in everyone's best interests, Emma takes the lower-class Harriet Smith (Debbie Bowen) under her wing and sets out to find the girl a suitable husband, disregarding what havoc she wreaks along the way. Her foolish father (Donald Eccles) cannot temper Emma's fancies; only the stern Mr. Knightly (John Carson) offers any reason or restraint. This sprightly adaptation is far superior to the mediocre 1996 film (starring Gwyneth Paltrow) and on par with the ingenious Clueless, which cunningly translates the story to a Beverly Hills high school. The luxurious span of a six-part miniseries gives this version the opportunity to revel in Emma's every deliciously misguided moment. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

Poor casting ruins a decent screenplay
This Emma follows the book faithfully, which means that there is plenty that could be cut. The main problem is the lead actors. They are much too old to be 21 year old Emma and 36 year old Mr. Knightley. If you want to see an Emma that is light and funny and sweet, like the spirit of the novel, get the 1996 A&E/BBC production starring Kate Beckinsale.

Emma
One of Jane Austen's really enjoyable classics. Great for a cozy evenilng in front of fire.

It's engaging
Quite good. Godwin portrayed Emma in a style I thought more in keeping with Austen's character; not beautiful, and very human. Knightley wasn't too old or wooden; his hesitancy in the film conveyed the hesitancy that a man in that type of relationship in that period would feel towards a woman of Emma's age (a hesitancy, perhaps even of today). I thought the costumes and interiors were of the period. The absence of servants was too evident, but that's the way Austen writes -- her characters just glide above the surface of work, not doing it themselves, or hardly supervising it, whether in the fields, the kitchen, or the house -- it's all an abstract domestic sphere. But that the novelist's choice -- to write about what she knows -- and that what this film conveys.