The Secret Garden (1993) The redemptive power of spring is a common theme in literature, but certainly less so in movies (tending to focus more on plot process than seasonal transition). Agnieszka Holland’s retelling of this turn-of-the-century nursery standard is so evocative of spring you can practically smell the wakening soil. The story centers around Mary (Kate Maberly), an imperious and sullen child orphaned and sent to live with the husband of her late aunt at his grand English estate. Finding a locked garden as neglected as herself, Mary sets about bringing it back to life – as well as a bedridden cousin, more of a grouchy snipe than she is, convinced he’s already on his death-bed at 10 years old. Endless moors, swaying ivy, twittering robins, shoots struggling in the weeds, lads riding bareback – there isn’t a moment of this film that doesn’t feel like winter’s end. Don’t relegate it to the children’s bin.
Emma (1996) Jane Austen’s tale of the young matchmaker with social stature, a doting father, and awful instincts about the suitability of mates. Emma Woodhouse takes a plain-Jane mouse under her wing and tries to plan a shiddoch with the insipid Reverend Elton, who actually hankers after Emma herself, and from there nothing goes as planned, including her own relationship with the sensible Mr. Knightly, played with intelligent humor by Jeremy Northam. A springtime tale of love played out in the pastoral English countryside where the ladies stroll over wooden bridges amid flocks of geese. Every scene is bathed in sunlight, crowning Gwyneth Paltrow’s golden tresses, and the few winter scenes do not shake the overall spring-is-in-the-air feel. The soothing scenery offsets the complex machinations of Emma’s faulty matchmaking and a sweet song by Ewan McGregor is a bonus.
