The process of adapting a novel into a feature film is fraught with pitfalls. To accommodate a two-hour running time, scenes must be shortened, characters rendered two-dimensionally, even whole subplots excised. And yet if the result is a complete narrative, true to the novel’s insights and rendered in compelling cinematic terms, no one will be bothered by these changes. Jane Austen’s novels, specifically, possess an elusive intimacy in their prose that requires extraordinary skill to translate into drama. Austen tells her stories in the third person, but through the eyes of one character, using long descriptive passages to involve us in her hopes and fears.

Adapting this approach to film is difficult, but not impossible. Last year’s Persuasion, an achingly moving Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Austen’s novel, demonstrated that a skilled filmmaker can create unbearable tension by training his compassionate eye on a woman no one else sees, telling her story through her expressive face.

Because Emma is a comic novel, however, there is an ironic fillip to the Austenian tone. We read only the heroine’s interpretation of events, which we know to be skewed by her willful self-delusion and belief in her own invincibility. Emma’s egotism leads her far astray, but we follow like doting suitors, both dreading and enjoying the hilarious consequences of her mistakes. By contrast, a comic film usually observes its characters from an anonymous, neutral point of view. How do you turn the camera into the confidant of a woman who is already the satisfied center of her own universe? Perhaps this close relationship between heroine and audience is impossible to convey in any medium other than narrative prose. Certainly the new film version of Emma lacks it entirely.

In writer-director Douglas McGrath’s adaptation, Gwyneth Paltrow plays Emma Woodhouse, a young woman whose window of matrimonial opportunity is slipping by without her notice. She busies herself taking care of her father and arranging romances in the town of Highbury. Her latest project is Harriet Smith (Toni Collette of Muriel’s Wedding), a girl with no connections whom Emma is determined to pair with Mr. Elton, the local vicar. The progress of her scheme interests her friend and confidant Mr. Knightley (Jeremy Northam), a plain-speaking man who warns Emma when her meddling exceeds moral boundaries.

McGrath juggles a slew of characters with strong personalities and complex relationships. To his credit, the attentive moviegoer will be able to follow their intricate dance quite well. Most of the actors charm and engage us, although Collette is encouraged to portray Harriet as a clumsy buffoon. Northam and Sophie Thompson, as the fatally dull Miss Bates, are especially subtle, and Juliet Stevenson’s Mrs. Elton enlivens the end of the film with her fake modesty and endless prattle. As Emma, Paltrow has the correct air of superiority, deviousness and good intent. She tends to declaim, perhaps due to her efforts to maintain an accent, but the other actors set a good example of natural delivery.

The script adapts Austen’s sparkling dialogue and plot structure capably, and McGrath directs several well-staged comic scenes and two exciting dramatic ones—a dance at which Harriet lacks a partner, and a piano-forte concert. Yet glaring errors in tone and execution reveal that he doesn’t know how to throw out good ideas that don’t advance his story. He succumbs to the temptation to enliven conversations with camera movement. But by circling his actors and cutting from one to the other as they speak, he prevents them from playing to each other and turns the dialogue into a pair of interspersed monologues.

McGrath uses two other striking directorial tricks that would be effective if he only used them sparingly: cutting in the middle of a sentence to another scene in which the sentence is completed, and keeping an actor’s face hidden for a moment during an entrance. Unfortunately, McGrath pulls these rabbits out of his hat with monotonous regularity, and the first actually causes some confusion. McGrath and his cinematographer, Ian Wilson, illuminate their scenes with self-consciously natural lighting sources, such as shafts of light from windows. In one such scene, Paltrow is placed with her back to a window, while actress Greta Scacchi (as Mrs. Weston) faces the light. When McGrath cuts to a close-up of Paltrow from the front, however, her face is fully illuminated. The continuity error is so jarring that for a moment I thought McGrath had cut abruptly to another scene, as he is wont to do; it took me a few seconds to realize that I was still listening to the same conversation.

Without Austen’s tone, what remains of the source material is mostly plot and character. All the famous scenes are here—the carriage ride, the riddle book, the picnic—but in such abbreviated form that the motivations of the characters are lost. Unless we see the adoration of her picnic companions going to Emma’s head, for instance, Miss Bates’ affecting reaction to her thoughtless snub is wasted; without context, we don’t understand why Emma would be so uncharacteristically cruel. Other elements of the plot take on a routine, predictable quality; we know what is bound to happen because we have been observing with godlike omniscience, rather than immersed in Emma’s skewed point of view. A celebrated scene such as Mr. Elton’s revelation in the carriage, robbed of its surprise by the camera’s all-seeing eye, becomes merely an obligatory nod to the novel.

As the film nears its end, McGrath seems to grow increasingly desperate to achieve the unachievable, and details like continuity are left far behind. He throws in voice-overs from Emma, Mrs. Weston, and Mrs. Elton—the last spoken directly to the camera. Comic business and transitional scenes are invented out of whole cloth, with dialogue so unlike Austen as to be obvious to the most casual viewer. (One of Emma’s later voice-overs begins, “Dear Diary....”) Northam’s stubble grows and recedes during a single scene, while Emma’s reactions are filmed, inexplicably, from breast height. And the movie ends on a horrendous jump-cut because the director did not have the foresight to shoot the scene with his camera already on a crane, ready for a swooping ascent into the sky.

The film as a whole does not deserve complete dismissal. It conveys a complicated plot very well, and at times it exhibits greater promise. McGrath does have a knack for holding group shots, giving the audience time to read the characters’ expressions and experience the thrill of discovery. Emma would remain worthwhile, if only for the inherent humor of its characters and story.

Even for a slight pastime, however, the movie’s lapses into inconsistency and sloppiness are distracting. Most viewers will put these aside in favor of the movie’s pleasures. Those delights, though, all spring from the excellence of its source material, while the frustrations of Emma all stem from the conventions of literary adaptation. In this light, the achievement of last year’s Persuasion looms ever larger. From Emma we learn only the limits of translating Jane Austen to the screen. In hindsight, it seems as if Persuasion reached impossible heights before Emma showed that it couldn’t be done.