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Emma review sweetness, spite and bared bottoms | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

Anya Taylor-Joy revels in the role of the handsome, clever heroine with a sadistic streak in this amiable adaptation of Jane Austens great romcom

Not badly done, Emma. Novelist Eleanor Catton has scripted this amiable, genial and interestingly unassuming new adaptation of Jane Austens Regency classic, the great prototype romantic comedy, though it may be truer to call it a marriage comedy or marrcom. Music video specialist Autumn de Wilde makes her feature directing debut, with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt often confecting a buttery sunlight in which to shoot. De Wilde and Catton are pretty content to let the story itself do the work, getting the big moments, letting the subtleties go, but showcasing a very watchable lead turn from Anya Taylor-Joy whose eerily unblinking gaze has something calculating and predatory.

This movie does take a bit of time to settle down, with a frantically intrusive musical soundtrack at the very beginning, chirruping away under the action to make sure we understand how sprightly and amusing things are supposed to be. There is also what I can only describe as some startling buttock action. Dishy Mr Knightley is briefly glimpsed stark naked from the, ahem, rear. And Emma herself, standing alone with her back to the chimneypiece on a winters day, bizarrely hoists her skirts to get the full benefit of a roaring open fire, without obviously troubling herself to ascertain that the servants are not nearby. But these indiscretions happen at the very beginning, after which the movie keeps its full period costume sedately in place.

Pernickety
Pernickety Bill Nighy, left, as Mr Woodhouse. Photograph: Box Hill Films

Taylor-Joy is the famous Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich but, most importantly of course, unmarried, subverting sexual politics by bearing the previous three attributes as coolly as any eligible bachelor. She passes her time by matchmaking, a passion into which she diverts her own romantic frustrations. Emma has found a suitor for her former governess Miss Taylor (Gemma Whelan), who leaves their home to marry Mr Weston (Rupert Graves) thus grieving Emmas pernickety old dad, in which role Bill Nighy is inevitably, amusingly cast. Emma cant wait to set up her low-born friend Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) with the oleaginous clergyman Mr Elton (Josh OConnor), despite Mr Eltons socio-sexual intentions being elsewhere engaged, and despite sweet-natured Harriets tendresse for local farmer Mr Martin (Connor Swindells).

Arrogant heir-to-a-fortune Frank Churchill (Callum Turner) intrigues Emma, though he is perhaps more enamoured of Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson) and Emma is continuingly piqued by the intimate, needlingly flirtatious criticisms of Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn), whose brother is married to Emmas sister. Their meet-cute has been going on since childhood.

Taylor-Joy is interestingly cast, especially for Emmas legendary nasty moment, a flash of spite and sadism in which Taylor-Joy suddenly resembles the sinister rich kid she played in Cory Finleys recent thriller Thoroughbreds. Emma waspishly humiliates tiresome old Miss Bates (Miranda Hart) in front of everyone during an outing to Box Hill, an act of despicable cruelty for which she is famously criticised by Mr Knightley it was badly done and for which she gets karmic justice. Yet Emma is so conceited that afterwards, when she is very contrite, her sense of status is such that she cannot quite bring herself to apologise to Miss Bates explicitly, leaving us to wonder how intentional a character revelation this is.

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Virile and demanding Johnny Flynn with Anya Taylor-Joy. Photograph: Allstar/Working Title Films

Sometimes the casting and staging work well, sometimes not so well. That excellent actor Josh OConnor is forced into a pantomime role as Mr Elton, an unsympathetic Uriah Heepy-creepy performance that does not really suit him. Maybe he would have brought something more interesting to the role of Frank Churchill. Sometimes the look of the movie is a bit bland, and the Gypsies who at one stage attack Miss Smith are kept coyly off-camera.

But Johnny Flynn is virile and demanding as Mr Knightley (Jeremy Northam was a more cerebral one opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 version), with a prickly moral sense conflicting with something robustly sensual. I wonder if Flynn shouldnt at some stage play Alec dUrberville? But the real revelation for me was Mia Goth as Harriet, a gawky, maladroit yet engaging and touching portrayal of a lonely and rather scared young woman who looks as if she has been crying herself to sleep. Goth was surely influenced by the late, great Brittany Murphy who played the Harriet-equivalent character Tai in Amy Heckerlings Jane Austen homage, Clueless. A sweet natured Emma, though a little too modest.

Emma is released in Australia on 13 February, in the UK on 14 February and in the US on 21 February.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/14/emma-review-jane-austen-anya-taylor-joy

The War of the Roses at 30: still one of the nastiest comedies of all time

The brutal 1989 hit took a much-loved onscreen pairing, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, and tore them to pieces

Its easy to forget just how consistently, bracingly nasty The War of the Roses is, thanks in great part to the extravagant, and festive, studio packaging it arrived in, unwrapped in cinemas 30 years ago this month. It was fast-paced, glossy, Christmassy and, deceptively, it starred one of the most beloved onscreen couples of the 80s: Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Audiences were accustomed to seeing them bicker in the hit adventures Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile but their sparring was only ever of the screwball variety, a string of lighthearted quips signposting a Billy Ocean-soundtracked happy ending on the horizon.

At the end of the decade, they reunited to show us that happily ever afters are as fantastical as treasure maps and that early romance will more likely give way to seething resentment and sadistic violence. The film was a cruel R-rated footnote to their era of PG-13 flirting and it both shocked and compelled me as a child whose family was in the thick of a divorce at the same time. I didnt see it upon release I was five at the time but as it tore its way to the small screen, it became an early object of obsession. Each rewatch was met with a certain amount of parental displeasure, an understandable concern that I would blur the lines between what happened on screen and what was happening in real life

The War of the Roses unfolds as a cautionary tale, shared by the lawyer Gavin DAmato (Danny DeVito, the reliable third wheel in Douglas and Turners previous two capers and also playing director here) with a client seeking a divorce. Urging him to consider his options, he tells the story of the Roses, a couple whose marital bliss ended in disaster. They met great. They agreed on that, he says, while were taken back to a charming meet-cute as Barbara (Turner) and Oliver (Douglas) compete at an auction in Nantucket. The film leaps forward from the auction to the bedroom to their first apartment to their first house, the couple gliding from one rite of passage to the next, ticking every box that society has taught them to tick. Barbara becomes the perfect housewife, Oliver goes from associate to senior partner at his law firm and they have two cute kids, one boy and one girl.

Everything was working for the Roses, Gavin says. Let me restate that. The Roses were working for everything.

Because in Michael J Leesons exuberantly cynical script, based on the book by Warren Adler, hard work only gets you so far. The Roses were doing everything they thought they needed to do to be happy but it wasnt enough. Those cute kids grow up to be overweight and insolent. That grandiose house ends up feeling empty and alienating. Their relationship goes from fun and frisky to stale and stuffy. The cracks that start to show are initially relatable the annoying way your partner laughs, the rambling way they tell a story, the endless fucking snoring and the escalation is believably restrained. For a while. But the potholes they encounter culminate in more of a sinkhole, those niggling issues no longer fixable with just a brave face.

Barbara asks for a divorce. Oliver says no. Barbara wants the house. So does Oliver. Both stand their ground, refusing to abandon their much-loved home, and the competitive edge that brought them together on that rainy Nantucket day soon becomes the same thing that starts tearing them apart. Its the cruel irony of so many breakups and the film revels in this. As their beautiful house becomes a war zone, the ornament they playfully fought over years ago is brought back to be used as a cruel reminder of what they once had. Its the last straw that forces them into their final physical duel, which leads to their deaths.

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Photograph: taken from picture library

In this years wonderful, Oscar-tipped drama Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach similarly shows how divorce can bring out the worst in a couple, especially in one virtuosic show-stopping argument, but he also shows how humanity can still be maintained and, in a gut-wrenching final scene, how tenderness remains. In The War of the Roses, theres no such relief. As the crumpled-up couple lie dying on a broken chandelier, one thats crashed to the ground, Oliver reaches to touch Barbara, music swelling, but she pushes him off, a final, brutal rejection that remains one of the coldest endings I can remember in studio cinema.

Critics at the time were unsure what to make of it, unsure exactly how to enjoy watching a sprightly holiday comedy involving two big stars inflicting verbal and physical abuse on each other. In a mostly positive review, Roger Ebert nonetheless remarked: There are times when its ferocity threatens to break through the boundaries of comedy to become so unremitting we find we cannot laugh, while Janet Maslin praised its outstanding nastiness but worried that the ending took things too far.

It was rare in 1989 and arguably rarer now to see a film of this scale have the courage of its convictions, maintaining its dour worldview right up until the bitter and bloody end. Dark studio comedies tend to end with light in fear of scaring off the wider crowd needed to justify a hefty budget, but global audiences embraced The War of the Roses in all its filthy glory. It was a box office smash, making $160m worldwide (with inflation, that number doubles). And whats most revealing about its success is that it outgrossed both Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, a happy ending for a film so keen to avoid one.

But for all its critical and commercial wins at the time, it has not had the afterlife one might expect. In the years since, its cultural impact has been surprisingly slight and despite talk of adapting Adlers rather mediocre follow-up novel, The Children of the Roses, its the rare 80s hit not to receive a sequel, remake or reboot a blessing, Id argue. Its DNA can be felt, though, mostly in Gillian Flynns cynical marital thriller Gone Girl and its faithful big-screen adaptation, with the author herself naming Adlers source novel as one of her favourites. Whats fascinating, on my umpteenth rewatch this year, is just how cruel it still is, 30 years on, at a time when its much harder to shock. Its less the behaviour of the couple and more how it found its way into a film of this scale and gloss, uncensored, played for laughs.

As a child, I think I found something cathartic in its garish excess. It gave me the chance to laugh at a situation that was humourless in real life. As an adult, Im far removed from that experience, of witnessing my parents divorce, but closer to my own romantic history and theres something similarly fulfilling about witnessing the fall of the Roses. They act in ways that I would never but their relentless spite, right up until the finale, is oddly satisfying, a dogged commitment to not forgiving, forgetting or pretending that wounds have healed.

Its an untamed assault, a frantic, shameless race to, as Oliver puts it, the deepest layer of prehistoric frog shit at the bottom of a New Jersey scum swamp and, ultimately, a horribly convincing argument against matrimony. I remain unmarried.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/05/the-war-of-the-roses-at-30-still-one-of-the-nastiest-comedies-of-all-time

John Witherspoon, Friday actor and comedian, dies aged 77

The versatile actor and comic, who played Ice Cubes father in the comedy franchise, has died in Los Angeles

Actor-comedian John Witherspoon, who memorably played Ice Cubes father in the Friday films, has died. He was 77. His manager Alex Goodman confirmed that Witherspoon died in Los Angeles. No cause of death was released.

The actor had a prolific career, co-starring in three Friday films, appearing on The Wayans Bros television series and voicing the grandfather in The Boondocks animated series. His film roles included Vampire in Brooklyn and Boomerang, and he was a frequent guest on Late Show with David Letterman.

For many, his most recognisable role was Pops, Ice Cubes father in the stoner comedy Friday and its two sequels, playing a crude but affectionate father trying to guide his son to be better.

Life wont be as funny without him, Ice Cube said in a Twitter post, adding that he was devastated by news of Witherspoons death.

Regina King, who appeared as Witherspoons daughter in Friday and also voiced both of his grandsons in the animated series The Boondocks, called him her comedic inspiration on Twitter.

Goodman referred to a family statement issued to Deadline that said the family was in shock over Witherspoons death. The statement says Witherspoon, who was born on 27 January, 1942, is survived by his wife, Angela, and sons JD and Alexander.

JD Witherspoon tweeted that he was happy for all the great times he and his dad had together. Wed roast each other like homies more than Father & Son, and I really liked that. He was my best friend & my idol. Love U Dad Ill miss u.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/30/friday-star-john-witherspoon-dies-aged-77-ice-cube