If you’ve seen it just post something - you don’t need to read all my waffle.
I think the 27 year old Romola Garai is perfect as the 20 year old rich, powerful and headstrong Emma. But I think Garai is wasted on this production.
First, the acting: Jonny Lee Miller looks the part as Knightly (despite what some think he’s actually the same age as the character). Unfortunately I don’t think he’s playing the part with the amount of gravitas that the character has in the book.
I think most of the women are ok - Harriet is good and Tamsin Greig is doing some interesting stuff with Miss Bates teetering on the edge of insanity.
Knightly’s brother is excellent, though he is an insignificant character, and although some people on another forum thought the tenant farmer chap was supposed to be ugly I thought he was cast well. In fact it is only Emma, who cannot see through her class bigotry, who thinks he is physically ugly.
I am very disappointed with Gambon’s portrayal of Mr Woodhouse. Woodhouse is a passive aggressive emotional abuser (Austen would not have used this language, obviously, but she would have fully understood the subtleties of the character’s flaws). You could not get a minor character that would be more fun to play. But Gambon, who admits to not having read the book, is playing him with no depth whatsoever. I wish we could have had Simon Callow, who has read everything, playing him.
Other than the acting, my other gripe is the way it has been filmed. IMO films like Barry Lindon or even The Witchfinder General set the standard for how films set in the British / Irish countryside before the industrial revolution should look and feel. On a scale of 1-10, with Barry Lindon at 10, I think this production gets at most 3. The CGI is awful. I could understand them using CGI if it was for recreating old buildings. But no, they are using CGI to make it look like a different season, which I find unforgivable. Unless you’re Oscar Wilde, all British literature, film and other arts are utterly beholden to the seasons and the weather, whether your setting is the city, the countryside or the suburbs. That shouldn’t pose too much difficulty for filming - you just wait a few months until the weather conditions you want come around. If the BBC are so screwed for finances that it’s cheaper to do crappy CGI then I don’t think they should be making the production, or they should just film it in front of theatre flats (that would at least have a more authentic atmosphere). My point is that if you’re filming a British story in Britain, if you genuinely love what you’re doing then the one thing you should never fake is the British weather.
In this production you had deciduous trees in leaf at Christmas. What was even worse was when you had Emma and her dad standing at the door waiting for the rellies to come for Christmas. Behind them the sun was casting shadows at angles of about 40 degrees from vertical, which would never happen at Christmas. I don’t think this is a geeky point - anyone who has artistic sensibilities and is aware of the contrasts you get in temperate zones would instinctively feel something was wrong. All the lighting, whether indoors or out, at day or night, seemed wrong. I can’t remember whether there are any winter scenes in Barry Lindon but if there were I don’t believe they’d have felt as wrong as the ones in this production.