`EMMA' ASCENDS TO TOP OF AUSTEN MOVIE PILE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

The Jane Austen movie trend just keeps getting better and better. ``Emma,'' like last year's ``Persuasion'' and ``Sense and Sensibility,'' is witty, literate, enchanting and not without a few insights into matters of the heart.

But more than those fine earlier films - and more than ``Clueless,'' which was basically an update of the same story - ``Emma'' packs a dramatic wallop. Though frivolous and effervescent and completely laced-up in its high English manners, ``Emma'' becomes a movie about feelings so deep it downright gives you the shivers.

Two Americans - director Douglas McGrath and headliner Gwyneth Paltrow, both of them tackling those positions for the first time - possess deceptively light touches. They delight us with what appears to be a civilized souffle, yet all the while they're stewing up a rich, hearty emotional feast.

Like her ``Clueless'' American cousin, Emma Woodhouse is a wealthy, charming and completely self-satisfied young woman who's convinced she knows what's best for everyone. She's the picturesque English village of Highbury's expert on romance, circa 1816. Only Emma's never been in love herself, which she certainly doesn't consider a liability to her matchmaking prowess.

Which, of course, it fatally is. Emma proves particularly inept at coupling up the teen-age Harriet Smith (Toni Collette, the star of ``Muriel's Wedding'') with whom she considers the proper gentleman.

First there's the eligible young vicar Mr. Elton (Alan Cumming, not quite as creepy as he was in ``Circle of Friends''), whose eyes can barely register Harriet in the glare of Emma's brilliance. Then there's the dashing Frank Churchill (``Trainspotting's'' Ewan McGregor, unrecognizable from the heroin movie), who Emma understands to be smitten with her - perhaps erroneously.

Ultimately, there's Emma's relative through a family marriage, Mr. Knightley (Jeremy Northam, seen last summer in ``The Net''). Harriet thinks he's quite fine, and Emma does not disagree. Yet Knightley has a tendency to scold Emma for meddling and - in the film's most powerful sequence - he really lets her have it for an unforgivable breach of etiquette.

It's at this point that ``Emma'' moves beyond droll romantic comedy into a true drama of manners. It illuminates, like few English period films (``Howards End'' being one of the few) ever do, how what looks to us like ridiculously artificial behavior once crucially defined people's identities. This creates a marvelously charged setting in which Emma can, finally, explore the uncharted regions of her own heart.

Paltrow strikes just the right, wanna-hug-her/wanna-strangle-her balance here; her Emma means so well, and actually knows so little, that you ache to forgive her smugness. Paltrow quickly gets us past the ``Can she keep her accent straight?'' stage (she can) and entraps us, like most of Emma's victims, in an enchanting web of delusion.

The mostly British supporting cast is superb, especially Juliet Stevenson as the inevitable Mrs. Elton, a comic snob of uproariously hissable dimensions.

But perhaps the most amazing performer here is McGrath, a Texan whose background runs to writing gigs on ``Saturday Night Live,'' with Woody Allen (``Bullets Over Broadway'') and satirical magazine pieces (The New Republic's Shrub and Flapjack Files). He's got a, well, persuasive handle on both the story's social setting and the grammar of movies. Needless to say, he can direct wonderful actors with the best of them, too.

Most unexpectedly of all, ``Emma'' turns out to be a movie that should speak strongly to anyone. You don't have to be an English lit lover to understand its universal predicaments, and with its unflinching depiction of love's labors loused up, it's a Jane Austen movie even guys can like.

Heck, I might even read the book now.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Emma'' (PG; mild violence).

The stars: Gwyneth Paltrow, Toni Collette, Alan Cumming, Jeremy Northam, Ewan McGregor, Greta Scacchi, Juliet Stevenson.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Douglas McGrath, based on Jane Austen's novel. Produced by Patrick Cassavetti and Steven Haft. Released by Miramax Films.

Playing: Avco, Westwood; AMC 14, Century City; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; NuWilshire, Santa Monica.

Our rating: Four Stars.