Our look back at 1995 continues with Lynn Lee on an unexpected breakout...
Clueless turned 20 this week, but as the Internet has constantly reminded us, it hasn’t aged a day. At once timeless ("a classic," as Cher would say) and delightfully dated, it’s a modern riff on a period piece – Jane Austen’s Emma – that's become something of a period piece itself. The latter aspect tends to draw attention away from the former, but I happened to see the movie again at a recent party and was reminded not just how perfectly it captures the ’90s, but also (1) how brilliantly it adapts Emma, and (2) how 1995 really was the breakout year for Jane Austen in film.
Keep in mind that prior to 1995, the only film version of a Jane Austen novel was the 1940 B&W “Pride & Prejudice” starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. 1995 changed all that...
In addition to Clueless, we got the much-fêted Sense & Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee and scripted by & starring Emma Thompson, and the quieter but still-acclaimed Persuasion starring Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds. Not to mention the BBC six-part miniseries adaptation of Pride & Prejudice which, while technically made for the small screen, had far more pop-culture impact than all of the (many) previous BBC TV adaptations of Austen combined and propelled Colin Firth towards the movie-star status he still enjoys today.
In short: In 1995, Austen was a hot property.
And she’s stayed hot ever since, enjoying polished, high-profile, generally well-received big-screen adaptations of her novels, including the 1996 Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, a revisionist Mansfield Park (1999), and Joe Wright’s more-Brontë-than-Austen take on Pride & Prejudice (2005). She’s also bred countless spinoffs and modern-day retellings, some more memorable than others, from Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) to the Bollywood-touched Bride & Prejudice (2004) to the imagined Austen romance Becoming Jane (2007) to the Austen theme park fantasy Austenland (2013) and the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, based on the bestselling & most shameless cannibalization of the novel ever. It seems every year or two there’s some kind of homage to Austen in the movies, and it doesn’t look like the well’s running dry any time soon.
Yet 1995, which began it all, still remains the high water mark for Austen on film. Clueless was the first to show how her themes, characters, and sharp eye for social comedy, could be transferred to a contemporary setting – and did it so well that no movie since has topped it. As a straight adaptation, Sense & Sensibility, too, remains unsurpassed. It epitomized everything a top-notch director, screenwriter, and cast could do to make Austen’s actual world feel vivid, immediate, and lushly real. If it comes off a little glossier and more made-cute-for-Hollywood now than it did at the time, it’s still hugely enjoyable to watch, skillfully balancing the elements of social satire and more uncomfortable moral underpinnings of Austen’s work and tempering its joyful, feel-good romanticism with sober, Elinor-like realism about a society in which money could and did trump love. S&S also gave us two of the best actressing performances of the ’90s, as the film that introduced Kate Winslet to the world – or at least the part that hadn’t seen Heavenly Creatures – and reminded us of just how great Emma Thompson could be. Meanwhile, Persuasion, despite suffering from some fundamental miscasting, effectively captured the more melancholy, bittersweet, autumnal side of Austen that’s too often overlooked, and that I haven’t really seen in any subsequent Austen-based films.
Which leads me to wonder: has the well run dry?
Is there anything left for filmmakers to mine from Austen that wasn’t already done at its best 20 years ago and revisited with diminishing returns since then? Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing a contemporary take on the Gothic-spoofing Northanger Abbey (the only one of Austen’s novels that hasn’t been adapted to film) and maybe on Persuasion as well. But it’ll take a truly exceptional film to dislodge the preeminence of 1995 as the Year of Austen, and I’m not holding my breath.
Are you?