Emma.

In the title role of Douglas McGrath's film version of Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow was executing one of her character's many little social maneuvers when a woman seated in front of me clucked her tongue, shook her head, and murmured, with mingled affection and dismay, "she is really something else!" Up to then I knew I had been enjoying the movie, but that remark made me realize why. McGrath and Paltrow understand what Emma is. Essentially without occupation but possessed of demonic energy, she tries to make her little corner of the world perfectly happy and ends up wreaking havoc. With the exception of the utterly evil Madame de Merteuil of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Emma may be the most manipulative woman ever created by a novelist, yet who can doubt her essential benevolence? Bright, magnetic, gracious herself and the rouser of graciousness in others, she is also (in critic Ronald Blythe's phrase) a "smug Surrey goddess." Lionel Trilling was right to remark, in his brilliant critique of the novel, that one does not know how to have Emma. She is quietly infuriating, but wouldn't you rather party with her than with the selfless heroine of Persuasion? Of all Jane Austen's protagonists, of all the women in nineteenth-century fiction, Emma is the great Something Else.

Douglas McGrath understands, literally, where Emma is coming from. Under the credits, a cartoon Earth spins through the heavens, and soon we notice that the space on our planet is being hogged by that humongous country, England, but - can we credit our eye! - there are only two big cities in England! One is called London, and the other is Highbury, which just happens to be the residence of Emma Woodhouse. This is, of course, a steal from that famous New Yorker cover which gave a Manhattanite's concept of geography, but it wonderfully expresses Emma's world view. Within her little kingdom, Miss Woodhouse rules and knows who must marry whom, even if she must exert herself to bring it about.

There is a wickedly defining moment early in the movie when Emma and her protegee, poor simple Harriet, are seeking refuge from summer's heat in an arbor. Emma allows her friend to express admiration for the honest yeoman who is courting her. But then with quite another suitor in mind for her friend, Emma slyly insinuates that the current one has feet of clay. Poor Harriet's face falls, and she wonders what her benefactress would recommend? Emma leans forward in her chair and McGrath suddenly cuts back to a very long shot and nothing more can be heard of the conversation, but the thrust of Paltrow's extended body is as powerful as a ballerina's while the line of her long, delicate neck is as graceful as a swan's. But a swan can be vicious at times, can't it? Emma is just about to launch Harriet toward the first of three romantic debacles.

Yet Emma is not vicious, and the way Paltrow's face crumples when Mr. Knightly, her best friend, reproaches her for being sarcastic to a hapless bore at a picnic makes you remember and regret all the times when your own tongue was more acute than your heart. And this moment also shows McGrath's understanding that, in the world of Jane Austen (and occasionally in this great rough world outside her books), manners are morals, and that this is not a sign of overdelicacy.

Some of McGrath's staging is a little obvious (this is his maiden voyage), but he also pulls off a few beautiful sequences. And here creates the gentilesse of the period so well that when, late in the story, Knightly angrily grabbed Emma's arm, the audience around me gasped. In the well-bred context, this mild violence seemed more shocking than a hail of bullets in a Tarrentino flick.

All the performances are at least good and, aside from Ms. Paltrow's, two are superb: Jeremy Northham makes Mr. Knightly so worthy of his name that even his sententiousness is absorbed by his charm. And Juliet Stevenson presents Mrs. Elton, one of Austen's most wonderful monsters, as a sort of lyrical caricature of Margaret Thatcher: so unreachable in her self-assurance that she seems to be moving within a portable glass bubble.

There are only two problems with this movie. First, McGrath doesn't know what to do with that remarkable character, Jane Fairfax, any more than Jane Austen did. Fairfax, Emma,s nemesis, is a George Eliot character astray in Austen territory, an unfulfilled portrait in a nearly perfect work of art. (A few years ago, Joan Aiken wrote a novel with Fairfax as its heroine.) If Austen had fathomed this embryonic feminist, she might have expanded or exploded her book. The actress cast as Fairfax seemed a little too lacquered, more like Demi Moore in Disclosure than an orphan who's pulled herself up by her bootstraps. McGrath lets her fade away long before the conclusion is reached.

The stripping away of Austen's prose in order to present her story visually leads to an even more serious problem. As Robert Liddell, in The Novels of Jane Austen, points out, Emma is a kind of detective story, with romantic follies substituted for murders and Emma functioning as a madly incompetent sleuth. What's obvious to other characters remains opaque to her; what keeps the facts hidden from us, too, is the way Austen's prose adheres so strictly to Emma's point of view. Thus, Austen "snows" both her protagonist and her readers. But McGrath's camera reveals too soon the real love objects of Reverend Elton, Mr. Knightly, and the brash Frank Churchhill. If the movie Emma seems at times nearly a booby, it's only because, unlike the novelist, the director doesn't allow us to be boobies right along with her.

Never mind! Four big-screen adaptations of Austen in two years (I'm including the delightful Los Angeles transposition of Emma, Clueless, but not the soporific TV travesty made out of Pride and Prejudice), and all of them fine. Has any classic writer ever enjoyed such a run of cinematic good luck?

Kevin Costner's good luck is called Ron Shelton. Between Shelton's baseball movie, Bull Durham, in which Costner was excellent, and the director-writer's new golf comedy, Tin Cup, in which Costner is even better, the actor appeared haplessly as numerous superheroes like Robin Hood and that aqua guy with fins in Waterworld. While some actors like Bette Davis and John Gielgud must never stoop to conquer, never play ordinary mortals, others should never play anything but. Whenever you see him as a swashbuckler, you may soon become aware of how chinless Costner is, and how much better his lanky frame would look in chino trousers than in tights. But as Roy McAvoy, an ordinary man with two extraordinary qualities - his erratic golfing genius and his consistent bullheadedness - this actor gives us a Hemingway hero for these post-Hemingway times, not a stoic old titan tacitly watching sharks nibble away his big catch, but a fool persisting in his folly until a kind of wisdom, and a good woman, are won. Slamming his ball again and again into a lake instead of taking par and moving up to the green, McAvoy sends spasms of agony into the crowd watching, and we in the theater may groan, too; but Rene Russo, as the love of McAvoy's life, knows better. She dissolves into giggles, shakes her head, and delivers the right verdict: "He's crazy!"

Shelton's direction finds suspense in the arc of a golf ball in flight, and comedy in the verbal dueling between a player and his caddy, prima donnas both. His moviemaking is as relaxed and yet as purposeful as a good golfer's stroke.

In Emma, the heroine finds happiness by abandoning folly and finding her niche. Though Douglas McGrath is American, his movie, true to its source, is utterly European. In Tin Cup, the hero finds happiness by persisting in his folly and carving out his own niche. This is a very American movie.