Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen\u2019s novel. Released in 1995, it was directed by Ang Lee and is a movie with the pleasures of a golden age studio picture of the kind made by William Wyler. It was the second half of Thompson\u2019s Oscar double \u2013 she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End \u2013 and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing.<\/p>\n
With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen\u2019s comic register, expertly marrying it up to the romance, and 1995 now looks like the golden age of Austen adaptation, having also seen the Colin Firth\/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice on television and Amy Heckerling\u2019s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen\u2019s unique and toughly realistic concern with money and status \u2013 but on this more serious point, perhaps a rerelease is also due for Patricia Rozema\u2019s very worthwhile interpretation of Mansfield Park from 1999, a darker and more political take on Austen.<\/p>\n
Sense and Sensibility is a film stuffed with blue-chip British acting talent but, for me, Kate Winslet<\/a> is the movie\u2019s beating heart as the spirited and innocent Marianne Dashwood, younger sister of the more sober Elinor, played outstandingly by Thompson herself. With their widowed mother (Gemma Jones) and little sister Margaret, played by Myriam Fran\u00e7ois, the sisters find themselves evicted from their handsome estate due to a technicality of their late father\u2019s will and forced to occupy a modest cottage elsewhere.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n This film delivers the keynote generic moments: the formal ball in which dialogue is exchanged in the middle of silly dance moves, the secret engagement and the whispered gossip about wealth and projected annual income. The houses are, of course, grand and even the Dashwoods\u2019 cottage doesn\u2019t look too awful. There is a tree house that looks staggeringly big.<\/p>\n It is in her relatively reduced circumstances that Elinor encounters the personable Edward Ferrars, brother to the spiteful and grasping Fanny Dashwood, the sisters\u2019 relative by marriage played with vinegary glee by Harriet Walter<\/a>. Hugh Grant brings a coolly underplayed star power to the role of Edward; he has a hilariously diffident way of entering a room and a generally comic manner that Austen surely can\u2019t have imagined, but which works tremendously well. (Thompson invents for Edward and Elinor a tremendous gag about the location of the Nile.)<\/p>\n As for Marianne, she is bowled over by the bounderish Willoughby who is to shatter her heart, a role that Greg Wise made immortal (and his real-life marriage to Thompson is an extra-textual romance that has helped to make the film iconic). But there to heal Marianne\u2019s heart is the manly and reticent Colonel Brandon, played by Alan Rickman<\/a> with pride, decency and slot-mouthed hauteur.<\/p>\n Brandon is the third character in this film with a broken heart, having fallen for Marianne only to see her infatuated with the awful Willoughby, but it\u2019s a lump-in-the-throat moment when Marianne, recovering from her near fatal illness, sees how the devoted Brandon has brought her mother to see her and thanks him from her sickbed.<\/p>\n As for these men, well, it\u2019s Colonel Brandon who has the estate and Edward Ferrars is content with the relatively modest clergyman\u2019s living. God is not otherwise mentioned, other than in Marianne\u2019s astonished encounter with her faithless suitor in London: \u201cGood God, Willoughby!\u201d So the double wedding is a compromise between marrying for love and for something more material, and finds there is no great problem in balancing the two.<\/p>\n Sense and Sensibility is in UK cinemas from 8 August, and Australian cinemas from 10 August<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen\u2019s novel. Released…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":123521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-123520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}