[8.4/10] Clueless is a great film in its own right. It is effervescent, funny, and light, while having enough punch and insight to stick with you as an (admittedly candy-colored) story of growth and personal epiphany, and not a mere trifle. But it’s also a great adaptation. It captures the spirit of Jane Austen’s Emma while completely reimagining the style and setting, but still integrating key details from the source material in clever, potent ways. That’s the standard all adaptations should aspire to, and one that even the most faithful translation efforts of fare as varied as classic literature and comic books, tend to fumble.

Clueless reimagines Emma Woodhouse of Highbury as Cher Horowitz of Beverly Hills, but keeps the well-intentioned, but ultimately miscalculated efforts of Cher’s Regency equivalent delightfully intact. Like fellow genre-mate 10 Things I Hate About You the film adapts the classic comedy of manners tropes to the hustle and hierarchy of high school, breathing new life into it for a later generation. The film expertly conveys Cher’s mastery of her secondary school ecosystem, her search for love and self-discovery, and the clash between her spoiled naivete and her genuinely kind heart. It nicely covers her efforts to help (while remaking) the transfer student who becomes her new friend, Tai; to joust and disprove the bon mots of her naysaying step brother Josh, and to navigate the innumerable obstacles of high school, both real and imagined, with her best friend Dion.

The film has a knowing quality that makes it work from start to finish. It manages to walk the line between consistently poking fun at Cher and sympathizing with her, without ever harboring anyi contempt for her. It features one of the best uses of voiceover as a regular device in a movie. Often, that type of narration can be a crutch, but Clueless doesn't just use it to orient the audience to Cher’s little world and grease the wheels of plot progression; it uses her descriptions and observations to subtly illustrate the distance between things as they are and things as Cher perceives them. That helps her grand epiphany about Josh and about her desire to make good on her do-gooding land when the little world that she’s constructed unexpectedly shatters from the seemingly minor bumps of a failed driving test and an ill-timed barb from a one time protege.

The film doesn't shy away from ribbing its protagonist for her shallower pursuits or her presumed mastery of all things, but it also revels in them. The fact that Cher’s grand self-realization about the object of her affections and the better aim for her altruistic impulses is punctuated by an “ooh, I wonder if they have that in my size” captures that brilliantly. It’s funny, but not belittling, just an acknowledgment that Cher is who she is -- a fashion-forward, high school matchmaking, shopaholic -- but that doesn't make her flighty or airheaded. There’s some amusing and even trenchant gags about her perception of what’s normal or her privileged existence, but Clueless is always on Cher’s side, and that helps the audience to be too.

What also helps is the way that Cher is always trying to make things better, even if she can be a little self-serving and a lot naive about it. The show deftly communicates, in Cher’s dialogue and in her actions, how she pushes back against Josh’s nudges and criticisms that she should take an interest in the wider world beyond Beverly Hills and aim toward a greater good, she also subtly takes them to heart. The way she repeats the watchword of his critique when deciding to take on Tai as a personal project is a great signifier of her Tevye-esque propensity to challenge the bringer of some new idea only to turn around, adopt it, and even sell it in her own terms.

The film also not only adapts the broad strokes of Emma’s epiphany and redirection well, but also manages to incorporate the smaller details of the original novel well. Cher’s photography session with Elton and Tai does a nice job replicating Emma’s sketching abilities in a modern setting. Tai’s scary episode with some jerks at the mall makes for a nice stand-in for Harriet Smith’s run-in with some would-be roadside acosters. And even the key conversation between Cher and her father, where he compares his daughter’s robust, do-gooding spirit to her mother’s, feels like an approvable echo of the warm relationship between Emma and Mr. Woodhouse. (Although Mr. Horowitz could stand to expound on the virtues of gruel a little more for my personal amusement.)

The film does have some artifacts from the deeply 1990s atmosphere it inhabits. Beyond the numerous needle-drops that take old-timers like me back in time, the film embodies a view of high school, relationships, and the world that is very much of its time. And yet, the much ballyhooed fashion of the film is both iconic enough to be its own form of timeless, and a way that the film communicates character. Between the contrast of Cher’s meticulously-designed outfits and Josh’s more casual sartorial choices, and Tai adopting conspicuously more Cher-like designs and patterns as she becomes more like her mentor, the clothing is far more than an accessory here.

That goes for almost all of the film’s choices. In lesser hands, Clueless could be a frivolous film. But writer-director Amy Heckerling uses the high school fashion club operator perspective to give the movie a tasty candy coating, while putting something deeper and more resonant inside, with the two meshing perfectly. Clueless is, like its predecessor, a story of someone both aspirational and provincial, who learns to bridge the gap between her altruism and her myopia through the help of a few choices stumbles and a needler who nonetheless sees the best in her. That the film manages to embrace the soul of its source material, while moving it into such drastically different environs, is nothing short of magic, a yardstick that every adaptation, no matter how staid or imaginative, should hope to measure up to.