Net-flix-ations

I was a devoted Netflix subscriber for more than twenty years (starting with DVDs by mail), but I’ve become rather disenchanted, finding their programming not worth more than a few months viewing out of a year, and their streaming quite glitchy.  Nonetheless, it’s worth returning occasionally to salvage a few winners out of their nonstop flood of mediocrity.

Baby Reindeer (MC-88) is the most buzzworthy of new Netflix shows (and thankfully, it’s no Squid Game or Bridgerton, or any of that ilk).  Many’s the comedian who turns “their” worst traumas or embarrassments into a routine, and there are quite a number who have spun out impressive solo performance pieces.  But I credit Richard Gadd for digging deep and developing a 7-episode series about his interactions with a woman who stalked him, an older man who abused him, and a trans woman whom he loved, but not as much as he hated himself.  Very dark, but quite funny, with a message about empathy that transcends the seamy material.  He also enlists actors who make the most of their roles, notably Jessica Gunning and Nava Mau.  Though he narrates and stars himself, it’s telling that he enlisted two women directors to split the episodes, for something other than a guy perspective on his experiences.
 
One Day (MC-76) has some of the appeal of Normal People, in charting over time the relationship between a young, mismatched sort-of-couple.  And has the appeal of Amika Modi, who made such an impression in This Is Going to Hurt and here makes a refreshingly diverse rom-com heroine.  Her foil is Leo Woodall, who is certainly cute, and charming when he wants to be, but lacks soulfulness of a Paul Mescal.   They meet at graduation in Edinburgh in 1988, and each of the 14 more-or-less half-hour episodes shows them coming together (or apart) on that date in succeeding years, in differing places and situations.  They go through various humorous and dramatic changes, beyond the question of will they or won’t they, until a swerve into Love Story territory (“Love means always having to say you’re sorry”).  It’s a satisfying binge, if not an indelible experience.
 
Just before I paused Netflix back in January, I had read a glowing New Yorker profile of Jacqueline Novak and her one-woman performance piece On Your Knees (MC-tbd), so when I resumed NFX that was one of the first shows I watched.  As you might expect, a 97-minute aria on blowjobs is raunchy of course – but in an intellectual, highly-literary way, you understand – delivered with manic energy and stinging wit.  As lascivious as the topic may be, she stalks the stage in torn jeans and a gray t-shirt, and goes for something much deeper than titillation.  Feminist to be sure (though who am I to say?), and oh yes, it’s funny as hell, for anyone not turned off by the subject matter. 
 
Another female comic that kept me laughing was Rachel Feinstein with her Big Guy comedy special.  The title is what her outer-borough firefighter husband calls her, and with telling impersonations she delineates the cultural clash between a daughter of lefty Jewish intellectuals and the family of her working-class Catholic husband.
 
I stuck around on NFX long enough to see the latest from Richard Linklater, probably my favorite filmmaker over the past thirty years.  Hit Man (MC-82) returns him to Bernie mode, in a true-ish crime comedy based on a Texas Monthly article, with some hot romance added.  Hot indeed in the pairing of Glenn Powell and Adria Arjona.  He’s a mild-mannered psych/philosophy teacher, whose electronics hobby leads to part-time police work with a surveillance team, which in turn leads him to take on the role of a hit man in sting operations.  She is one of his targets, clearly seeking murder for hire, but also lovely and sympathetic.  He lets her go with a bit of kind advice, they meet again by chance, sparks fly, shit hits the fan.  Linklater and Powell, who collaborated on the screenplay, are both Austin TX boys, but shifted the setting to New Orleans, to good and witty effect.  The script gives Powell ample opportunity to show off his acting chops as well as his abs, as he takes on a different hit man persona for each potential client.  Ms. Arjona also has ample opportunity to shape-shift, and give off what I thought of as some Barbara Stanwyck energy.  With so much to delight, I’m not inclined to put forward my quibbles with the ending, but I am inclined to update my woefully out-of-date Linklater career summary [now done].  Score one for Netflix.  And check out this recent NYT interview, through which my temperamental and intellectual affinity with Linklater is highlighted, and in which he neatly ties the ending to his recent documentary Hometown Prison.
 
Nyad (MC-63) boasts a fully-committed performance by Annette Bening as the title character, and a highly-engaging one by Jodie Foster as her coach and right-hand woman, both Oscar-nominated and enough to make the film worth seeing.  Bening does not soften the rough edges of a questionable character on a chimerical quest (to swim from Cuba to Key West), but the film is based on Diana Nyad’s celebrity memoir and feels compelled to conform to all the conventions of the sports film.  Foster humanizes the proceedings and justifies the final realization that an individual’s accomplishment is really a team achievement.  Made by the directing pair of the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, the film is not superlong, but sometimes seemed as arduous and prolonged as the swim itself.
 
In a similar vein, The Novice (MC-85) follows a hardworking freshman as she tries to crack the varsity rowing team at an elite American university.  It’s obvious that first-time writer-director Lauren Hadaway knows whereof she speaks, and brings long experience as a sound designer to her maiden effort.  Visuals and music conspire to turn competitive sport into something like a psychological horror movie.  Isabelle Fuhrman is excellent as a presidential scholar who works obsessively to overcome her own feelings of not being good enough, which take her down dark paths of self-harm, relieved only by occasional moments of relief and beauty on the water.
 
I take note of two excellent documentaries now appearing on Netflix, though I’ll save comment for a forthcoming round-up of stand-out nonfiction films: Four Daughters (MC-80) and To Kill a Tiger (MC-88).  Netflix is not the invaluable resource it once was, but it still has some high-quality offerings. 
 
Since I stuck around on Netflix for an extra month to see Hit Man, I was finally able to follow up on a friend’s recommendation to watch Top Boy (MC-85), the UK’s answer to The Wire.  So far I’ve only seen the four-episode first season, will definitely watch more and report back.

Criterion of judgment

[First, a procedural note:  For films of the past quarter-century, I generally link to their Metacritic pages as the best portal for more information, including trailers, cast lists, and reviews.  For older films, I link to their Wikipedia pages, with two advisories: the Plot section is always rife with spoilers (if that matters to you); and for trailers and such, there’s always a direct link at the bottom to the film’s IMDb page, among other useful links.  So you never have to take my word alone on whether a film is worth seeing.]
 
Before I get started on another long celebration of the Criterion Channel, I want to highlight the next best streaming source for wide-ranging classics old and new, foreign and documentary, film and tv, namely Kanopy, which is available free through participating libraries, academic or public.  You’ll see the channel cited frequently as the place I found a film, sometimes when available on another channel that I don’t have a subscription to, and sometimes when I haven’t been able to find it any other place at all.
 
Such as four Eric Rohmer films that follow up nicely on one of my previous Criterion roundups, which led with the revival of Rohmer’s “Tales of Four Seasons” from the 1990s, and now Kanopy popped up with two of his “Comedies & Proverbs” from the 1980s, and two other anthology films from the same period.
 
First off, The Aviator’s Wife (Wiki), not remembered as one of my favorites, but this time around I appreciated the Rohmeresque irony of the title character never appearing in the film, and I took to Marie Riviere as l’autre femme more in the context of her other roles for Rohmer over the years.  It can all seem quite inconsequential unless you are attuned to his wavelength, with its everyday blend of eros, humor, and philosophic insight.  As much as Truffaut, Rohmer was a “man who loved women,” though perhaps less of a libertine and more a fond aesthetic admirer of youth and beauty.
 
It wasn’t till the final scene that I definitely remembered seeing Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Wiki), yet another amorous roundelay among young people looking for a proper mating.  Whether in Paris or various vacation venues, Rohmer is always attentive to architecture and environment, and this time it’s a newly-built satellite city around Paris, and a shifting group of young professionals.  This film is delightful, even if not memorable, in the long frieze of Rohmer’s portraits of desiring and desirable young people.
 
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Wiki) was definitely new to me, a country-mouse/city-mouse story of two young women who meet in the countryside and then room together in Paris, in four discrete episodes of understated humor.  This print seemed to be substandard, but the film itself is very much of a piece with Rohmer’s other work, and I was happy to see it.
 
Rendezvous in Paris (Wiki) details three separate anecdotes, in which different young characters meet up in a café, various parks, or the Picasso museum.  Each episode seemed fresh to me, even though I showed the third in my own anthology program at the Clark.  I’d almost recommend this as an introduction to Rohmer if you aren’t particularly familiar with his work, even before his acknowledged masterpieces.  If you like this, there’s plenty more where that came from.
 
While I was focused on other channels, Criterion accumulated several highly-rated streaming premieres.  First off, there was Our Body (MC-93), a Frederick Wiseman-like documentary about a French gynecological hospital, with one of 2023’s highest Metacritic ratings.  To tell the truth, for me it went from must-see to can’t-watch, given my squeamishness.  An admirable piece of work, but too much for my delicate sensibilities.
 
Then came two films high on my must-watch list.  Tótem (MC-91) is a dense and intimate family portrait as seen through the watchful, empathetic eyes of 7-year-old girl.  It’s the birthday of her father, an artist who is dying of cancer.  With her, we are thrown into the maelstrom of an extended Mexican family, breaking down and re-forming around the tragedy of a beloved younger son.  The patriarch is a grumpy psychologist with his own medical problems.  Two elder sisters are putting on the party for their sick brother, but from clashing perspectives.  The central girl, Sol, has younger and older cousins, and a fascination for small living things around her, as she is told not to bother her father, who is resting up for the party.  In a tight frame, with long up-close takes, we follow as Sol begins to put together a picture of a family coping with the unstated presence of death in their midst.  Her mother drops her off in the morning, leaving her (and us) to spend the day trying to make sense of what is going on around her, and then the mother returns for the party and a stunning celebratory performance they have worked out together.  Lila Avilés has crafted a small film of major import, full of life under the shadow of mortality,
 
A new film from acclaimed Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is always an event, though sometimes a prospect of endurance more than enjoyment, so I spread the 3¼ hour running time of About Dry Grasses (MC-87) over several evenings.  It’s slow-moving and extremely talky, but decidedly interesting, Chekhov filtered through Antonioni.  Set in desolate, wintry Eastern Anatolia, it follows three teachers who wind up on this remote posting for differing reasons.  One is a discontented art teacher who seems to have an inappropriate relationship with a middle school girl.  He and his roommate each form a relationship with a woman from another school who lost her leg in a terrorist bombing (Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes).  The film moves from desolate widescreen landscapes to crowded dark rooms, with long takes, stationary camera, and extended conversations with very little resolution.  So – not for everyone, but riveting for anyone who can get on Ceylan’s wavelength.
 
I missed a dimension of Anselm (MC-82), since Wim Wenders’ portrait of Anselm Kiefer is meant to be seen in 3-D, but I still found it engaging, though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the famous German artist.  There’s no narration and little speech altogether.  It’s mostly just Kiefer wandering around the large industrial estate where he produces and displays his art, in an installation as monumental as James Turrell’s Roden Crater.  For me it was enlivened by prior accounts from a friend who had visited both.  Kiefer is played as an 8-year-old boy in reenactments that convey what little is offered of his biography, and for later years there’s news footage of various sorts.  This documentary is reliant on how much interest and patience you bring to it.
 
Amanda (MC-81) is a privileged pain-in-the-ass post-adolescent, returned from college abroad and feeling stifled as she lazes about her parents’ mansion and tries futilely to connect with any other being, human or otherwise.  This is the debut film of Carolina Cavalli, and I appreciated its aura of authenticity as well as absurdity, sort of like a Milanese Lady Bird.  Amanda, a character made palatable by Benedetta Porcaroli’s portrayal, finally finds a best friend as aberrant and abrasive as herself, a match made in heaven, or some other place.
 
Unrest (MC-75) is an oddity that intrigued me, but seems unlikely to appeal to many.  The matter is significant, but the manner off-putting.  The story is set among Swiss watchmakers in the 1870s, when the engine of global capitalism is revving up, while the local workers strive to organize an anarchist commune, under the watchful eye of Pyotr Kropotkin.  The workers are primarily craftswomen doing incredibly detailed work, including placement of the all-important “unrest” wheel.  Much of the camerawork is off-center, from a security-camera-like distance where the viewer frequently cannot tell who’s speaking, among small figures crowded into a corner of the frame.  There are compelling close-ups of the painstaking work, some of the long shots privilege the natural background over the dialogue, and what relief and impact the viewer feels when actually able to see the face of the person speaking.  But overall, all sorts of interesting notions about politics and economics, about timekeeping and working conditions, are adumbrated indirectly and offhand, some quite humorously.  The Swiss director keeps his distance even though (or maybe because) the subject is part of his family history.
 
Criterion always has one or more Noir collections running, with an unusual angle taken on 1950 Peak Noir, which includes noir-inflected classics such as Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, and Panic in the Streets, all of which I admired but didn’t feel the urge to see again.  What first caught my eye was a Barbara Stanwyck that I’d never seen before, and wanted to add to my career retrospective.
 
The File on Thelma Jordon (Wiki) remakes the story of Double Indemnity, with Stanwyck as the femme fatale luring a supposedly wised-up guy into becoming an accomplice to her own dastardly plot.  She is reliably great with whatever material she’s given, but Wendell Corey is no Fred MacMurray.  And I might have said that Robert Siodmak is no Billy Wilder, but instead I made a note to look for other films he directed, since this had a very distinctive look and style, even when saddled with a wooden male lead and a fairly nonsensical script.  It’s not among Stanwyck’s unmissable performances, but displays her characteristic quality work.  And served as an entrée into other viewing from one of my toddler years.
 
Joan Crawford is not among the old Hollywood divas that I’ve fallen for, but I gave The Damned Don’t Cry (Wiki) a try because it was supposed to reflect her own rise from rural poverty to stardom, and be loved in particular by her fans.  God knows it was campy enough to verge on self-caricature, but I had no conception that it was based on the same situation as Warren Beatty’s Bugsy – let’s just say Joan Crawford is no Annette Bening.
 
I’d watched a few films in a recent John Garfield collection, but didn’t catch The Breaking Point (Wiki) till it appeared in this 1950 collection.  A reworking of Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not, this version not highjacked by Bogie-Bacall chemistry, as it pairs Garfield with Patricia Neal in a smaller but still effective role as a tramp.  Michael Curtiz directs with finesse, and Garfield demonstrates why he was a major star, anguished and soulful as a boat owner who must resort to smuggling, with mountingly disastrous results.   Within two years, hounded by HUAC, he would be dead of a heart attack at 39.
 
Caged (Wiki) has been called a “Camp classic,” but is something more than that, coming soon after The Snake Pit and leading to a whole subgenre of Women in Prison pictures (persisting all the way to Orange is the New Black).  It’s well-directed by John Cromwell, with a reasonable amount of verisimilitude and a pair of Oscar-nominated performances.  Eleanor Parker is surprisingly good in transforming from pregnant teen bride, jailed as accomplice to her husband’s fatal armed robbery, into a hard-bitten criminal in course of her sentence.  Hope Emerson plays the Nurse Ratchet-like prison matron, and Agnes Moorehead the reform-minded warden.  While not without its preposterous elements, the film is generally a serious-minded affair.
 
I’ve never really understood why some people consider Nicholas Ray to be a great director, and Born to be Bad (Wiki) does not change that.  And I’ve never seen much in Joan Fontaine, and her simpering mendacity here doesn’t change that.  Not quite bad enough to be good.

Not sure how I never saw a film as renowned as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (Wiki), but I was happy to catch it at this late date, as the template for so many jewel-heist capers.  One of the epochal noir masterpieces, this crisply-made crime drama is dotted with memorable performances, from Sam Jaffe as the Germanic mastermind to Sterling Hayden as the muscle he recruits to Louis Calhern as the shady lawyer who bankrolls the operation and a startlingly young and magnetic Marilyn Monroe as his girl on the side.  Jean Hagan and James Whitmore are also effective in supporting roles.  Of course there’s the caper and its unraveling, but for me the character development impressed most, hardboiled but something deeper too.
 
I wrapped up this calendrical cross-section by watching an Alfred Hitchcock film that I hadn’t seen before, Stage Fright (Wiki).  His return from Hollywood to England is less a murder mystery than a comedy about stage acting, with Marlene Dietrich as a swan-like chanteuse (whose husband is the victim) and Jane Wyman as the acting student who takes on various real-life roles to try to clear her long-time friend (Richard Todd) of suspicion, while deceiving the police officer (Michael Wilding) who wins her heart.  The supporting cast is sterling, and the dialogue witty, though it’s not very stirring as a thriller.
 
Whoops, one more 1950 film that I’d never seen, Night and the City (Wiki), not to be confused (as I was) with The Naked City, which has Jules Dassin also moving to London, in the midst of being blacklisted in Hollywood.  Richard Widmark goes with him as a dreaming and scheming American, a tout scrounging around for money before trying for a big score as a wrestling promoter, where he runs into a rough crowd.  As with his earlier film about NYC and his later film about Cleveland (see below), Dassin demonstrates a distinctive, sometimes overwrought thriller style and relies on location shooting for his action scenes.  Considered too dark upon release, the film is now taken as an epitome of noir.
 
(N.B.  Many of the films in the “1950 Peak Noir” collection will depart the channel at the end of June, but many will return in other collections, or can be found on other streaming channels.)
 
While immersed in the era of Hollywood films around the time of my birth, I watched two other noirish films. Undercurrent (Wiki) is not what you expect from director Vincente Minelli or stars Katherine Hepburn and Robert Mitchum.  She’s a scientist’s daughter, falling for the businessman who buys his invention, only to discover he is not the man she imagined.  And the brother whom he despises (Mitchum) is the opposite of what he claims.  It’s all quite implausible, but not offensively so.
 
In The House on Telegraph Hill (Wiki), Valentina Cortese is another woman married to a man (Richard Basehart, whom she married in real life) who is not what he seems.  But then neither is she, having taken the identity of a friend who died in their displaced persons camp after WWII.  In this Robert Wise film, the couple comes together for highly mixed motives and goes to live in a scenic San Francisco mansion, where nasty business is afoot.  Another white knight emerges to save our beleaguered heroine, in this tale from back in a previous age when gaslighting was à la mode.
 
I also sampled a couple of films, new to me, in a recent collection called “Hollywood Crack-Up” containing American films from the 1960s depicting societal or psychological breakdown, from The Manchurian Candidate to Pretty Poison.
 
Uptight (Wiki) is a remarkable document, if not a good film.  Jules Dassin imports the plot of The Informer from Dublin in 1922 to Cleveland in 1968, about a Black Panther-like group instead of the IRA.  The film is colorful in several senses, and highly stylized, but I was particularly struck by some remarkable location footage in The Flats at the time I was working down there, and around the Hough neighborhood, from when I was driving through that area while the streets were occupied by the National Guard.  So I was willing to overlook the film’s declamatory staginess for that window back in time, as it opens with MLK’s funeral and surveys a cross-section of Black responses to the tragedy.  Frequently over-the-top and stereotypical, and hampered by the source material, this film is still a worthwhile time capsule.
 
Pressure Point (Wiki) has a surprisingly current resonance (post-Charlottesville, “very fine people on both sides,” and all the rest), flashing back from 1962 to 1942 as prison psychiatrist Sidney Poitier tries to treat an unrepentant Nazi seditionist, startlingly well played by pop singer Bobby Darin (“Somewhere across the sea . . .”).  Based on a case study in Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, and well directed by Hubert Cornfield, it’s another evocative time capsule, speaking to the state of psychiatry as well as politics.  (And also hearkens back to Poitier’s doctor-treating-racist role in No Way Out, included in the “1950 Peak Noir” collection.)
 
Postcards from the Edge (1990, MC-71) has worn well.  Criterion had it in a collection of Shirley MacLaine movies, but I was most interested in Meryl Streep’s acting (and singing).  Mike Nichols directs Carrie Fisher’s story, based loosely on her relationship with her mother, Debbie Reynolds.  It’s a lively and funny Hollywood story, with many stars and stars-to-be parading through.
 
Criterion curates 4-8 new collections each month, so there’s always something new to explore in some depth.  (Which means some films leave each month as well.)  In June, there are new career retrospectives for the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Paul Schrader, and Céline Sciamma, each containing films well worth seeing or re-seeing. There are also clever thematic collections, which combine to make Criterion the one indispensable streaming channel, for which I have a charter annual subscription that comes to $8.33 per month.
 
In a previous compilation of Criterion reviews, I wrote at some length about my admiration for the filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, and then on Kanopy I found her precocious first feature film All is Forgiven (MC-85), made in 2007 but not released in the U.S. till 2021.  What’s most impressive is how her distinctive observational style was established right from the beginning.  This is a bifurcated story about a bifurcated couple, earnest Austrian professional woman and French would-be poet, a layabout devoted to drugs and drink.  Inevitably they split up, and the mother forbids any contact between father and daughter.  Jumping ahead a dozen years, the girl is a senior in high school (played beautifully by the older sister of the young girl), and her cleaned-up father tries to reconnect.  Don’t expect resolution from Hansen-Love, but count on intimate exploration of everyday realities.
 
That leads me to two other films I caught up with on Kanopy, to use my “tickets” before they expired at the end of the month (with a library card, you get to watch a certain number of films and tv series per month).
 
I’ve recently been on the lookout for films starring Virginie Efira, so Revoir Paris (MC-71) caught my eye.  I didn’t know what it was about, or that the role had won her a César for Best Actress, but Alice Winocour’s film was well worth finding.  Directly inspired by Islamist terror attacks in 2015, it follows a survivor who struggles to piece together memories of the event after she had blacked out the experience.  Like a detective, she follows clues to recreate the story, and finds a measure of healing by communing with other survivors in solidarity.  The horrific event is sensitively handled, and other perspectives amplify the central character’s experience.  Politics aside, the film offers immersion in the psychology and sociology of trauma, and another striking performance by Efira, who makes any film she’s in worth your time.
 
The Royal Hotel (MC-77) is a witty misnomer for a godforsaken bar deep in the Australian outback, where two vagabond American girls wind up when their money runs out.  I’d been impressed by director Kitty Green’s #MeToo first feature The Assistant, and my summation applies equally to this film: “This is a horror story of everyday life, relying on suffocating detail and observation, rather than melodrama.”   This one also stars Julia Garner, along with Jessica Henwick, as the two women tend bar to earn money to move on, serving a virtually all-male clientele of miners, with sexual harassment a given and the threat of violence always present.  Subdued but tense as any thriller, the film suffers from a would-be cathartic ending, like waking up from a bad dream.
 
You can bet I’ll be back soon with another round-up of Criterion and Kanopy titles, but next I’ll be dipping back into Netflix and then Hulu for updates, with another round-up of recently acclaimed documentaries. 

Reunion with Jane Austen

I recently reread, rewatched, and reviewed Mansfield Park, which launched me on a deeper dive back into one of my very favorite authors, and all the adaptations since the immortal (and unsurpassed) Jennifer Ehle-Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice from 1995 (of the 2005 version with Keira Knightley there is no need to speak).  I read several biographies, reread Persuasion, and then undertook to slow-read Emma, savoring a few pages at a time and delighting in all the ironies and foreshadowings, as well as the penetrating psychology of it all.  So then I had to go back and see which adaptation best fulfilled my vision of the book.
 
Given her subsequent history, I was quite surprised to find Gwyneth Paltrow a perfectly decent Emma (1996, MC-66, AMZ), if a little swan-like, in Douglas McGrath’s lively but thoroughly Miramax-ed adaptation.  Toni Collette as Harriet Smith and Ewan MacGregor as Frank Churchill are good, Jeremy Northam is appealing if not severe enough as Mr. Knightley, but Juliet Stevenson steals the show as Mrs. Elton.
 
It wasn’t that long ago that I enjoyed Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma (2020, MC-71), but on re-viewing after recent re-reading, I was much more intolerant, not so much with the highly-stylized and unhistorical design (first-time feature director Autumn de Wilde’s background was in music videos) as with a bad tendency to misrepresent the psychology of the characters and to invent scenes and dialogue that are just plain wrong.  None of the performances are natural or definitive.  Not as objectionable as the 2005 P&P, and fine for anyone who doesn’t realize what they are missing.
 
Nonetheless, I’ve long thought that Kate Beckinsale was the perfect Emma (1996, Wiki), and now even more so.  The rest of the cast is top-notch as well, with unbeatable performances from Samantha Morton as Harriet, Mark Strong as Knightley, and Olivia Williams as Jane Fairfax.  As with so many Austen adaptations, the script is by Andrew Davies, and the production team came over from the Ehle-Firth P&P, though in more abridged fashion.  This film features a valuable new take on the sociological dimension of the story, by showing how the lifestyle of the characters is supported by the arduous labors of servants.
 
I’m leery of algorithms, but glad for the one that took me directly to another Beckinsale-in-Austen adaptation, Love & Friendship (2016, MC-87).  Where twenty years before, Kate had played an immature young woman as conceived by a mature Austen, here she plays the older Lady Susan – the most accomplished flirt in England – as imagined by the teenaged Jane.  Whit Stillman’s adaptation re-teams Beckinsale with Chloe Sevigny in a film that made my best of the year list at the time, and holds up quite well.
 
This survey prompted me to take yet another look at Sense and Sensibility (1995, Wiki), which may be taken to have started the Jane Austen boom in film adaptations.  Wow, it’s still great.  Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning script makes the most of the only Austen novel I have no interest in rereading, her first to be published.  She is also perfect as the sensible older sister, while a startlingly young Kate Winslet is superb as the sensitive younger sister.  Counterintuitively, Ang Lee was a wonderful choice to direct, with a fresh eye for the English countryside and a knack for social satire and family drama.  The supporting cast is exceptional, with many stars-in-waiting.
 
Roger Michell’s 1995 adaptation of Persuasion (Wiki) with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds ranks at or near the top of my favorite Jane Austen movies, and there’s a 2007 BBC version (Wiki) with an admirable Sally Hawkins that’s pretty good as well.  (Reviewed here and here.)  I found the Netflix version of 2022 unwatchable, with an utterly miscast Dakota Johnson (as bad as Keira Knightley in P&P).
 
Did I somehow miss Northanger Abbey (Wiki) when it appeared on Masterpiece in 2007, or was I simply not astute enough to recognize the stars that Felicity Jones and Carey Mulligan would become, and passed over it as a mere TV movie not worth a review.  At any rate, I recently caught it on Kanopy, and whether I’d forgotten or not, was very happy to see it this go-round.  Felicity (though two years older IRL) is the young ingenue new to Bath taken in by marital schemer Carey.  As with so many British costume dramas, the character acting is good across the board, the settings and costumes first rate, and here one of Jane Austen’s slighter works, a parody of popular gothic novels, is handled with an appealing lightness.
 
Now I am back into re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and I’ll return with a postscript after taking another look at the canonical 1995 adaptation, and maybe even the one from 1940 with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.  Perhaps I’ll even take another look at Romola Garai as Emma. 
 
To whom I revert for a final thought.  Famously, Jane Austen believed no one would like her title character, except herself.  Famously, she has been proved wrong.  Emma Woodhouse is no Emma Bovary, but in her own way just as selfish and self-deluded.   Nonetheless her playfulness, wit, and good nature balance off her snobbery, privilege, and amour-propre.  In her most mature work, Austen draws on her own younger self with satire and indulgence, and portrays in the person of Mr. Knightley the wisdom and acuity gained over time.
 
Paltrow gets the pampered princess, Taylor-Joy gets the supercilious snob, but Beckinsale gets it all, but most of all Emma’s youthful delight in her own small world, and her own active brain.
 
The Austen boon has petered out with lackluster extensions like Sanditon or pale imitations like Bridgerton, in which I take no interest, but leaves behind a handful of masterpieces.  Without shame, I declare myself a genuine Janeite, both in print and on screen.