The 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” directed by Ang Lee and written by Emma Thompson, looms so large in the Austen screen canon that the intervening decades have only served up markedly different versions, including one BBC series, three Indian films in three languages and two from Hallmark, one of which is titled “Sense, Sensibility & Snowmen.”
But that movie came out nearly 31 years ago, and now the director Georgia Oakley has decided it’s time to tackle the tale again. Published anonymously in 1811, “Sense and Sensibility” was Austen’s debut novel, and its first draft was written much earlier, when the author was about 19 or 20 years old. Austen kept reworking it for years, during which time her father died and she, her mother and sister lived with one of her brothers, then moved into a cottage in Hampshire owned by another brother.
These biographical details help frame the story that “Sense and Sensibility” became: three girls and their widowed mother, left in economic precarity and searching for stability. The novel’s title announces its subject, but its undercurrent is financial anxiety, exacerbated by their society’s obsession with male heirs.
Oakley picks up on that and gently emphasizes it, with a screenplay penned by the novelist Diana Reid. For one, the cottage that the genteel Dashwood women — Mrs. Dashwood (Caitriona Balfe), her sensible eldest daughter, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), flighty middle child, Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) and the youngest, Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) — move into after the death of the girls’ father is very rustic. It boasts stone floors and walls, small rooms and the sense that when the winter comes the rooms will be very cold indeed.
But it is also clear that money, or rather the lack of it, is the defining factor in everyone’s life. The Dashwood women don’t have it; it’s all been settled on the girls’ older half brother, John (Tom Brooke) and his snootily odious wife, Fanny (Stacy Martin). Fanny’s older brother, Edward Ferrars (an excellent George MacKay), is the heir to his family’s estate, and thus locked into a life he does not want to live. It is largely because she has money that the kindhearted but exhausting Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw), a distant relative of Mrs. Dashwood’s, can do what she likes, as can her rough but generous son-in-law Sir John (Turlough Convery).
And of course, there is the dashing rogue, Willoughby (Frank Dillane) and his exact opposite, the upright and uptight Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum). Brandon falls for Marianne instantly upon meeting her; Willoughby sweeps her heart away. Marianne’s passions are a far cry from Elinor’s quiet and forlorn love for Edward. How their stories will be resolved is the swoony part.
That both young women will have to marry, and soon, is a foregone conclusion. When John Dashwood says that his stepmother — played by the exquisitely beautiful Balfe, who is 47 years old — can have scarcely 10 years left in her life, he clearly means it; such a woman could never hope to be married again. She can’t bear any more children, so what is her utility?
In the novel, Elinor is 19 and Marianne is 16. When she played Elinor, Emma Thompson was in her mid-30s. Kate Winslet played Marianne when she was not yet 20, but she and Thompson seemed mature and self-possessed. Here, Oakley opts to cast actresses in their 20s with a waifish look that feels closer to the characters’ ages, which both underlines their vulnerable state and makes their romantic fears and fantasies feel more youthful, less mature. They’re young girls, stuck trying to provide for themselves by securing a good match while also fulfilling the desires of their hearts. Will practicality have to win out over love? Should it?
This “Sense and Sensibility” is visually lovely, emphasizing the wide gulf between the stuffy world of manners and pecking orders and the wild freedom of forests and moors. As a retelling, it’s aiming for a looser and more realist feel than many other Austen adaptations, which run toward the corseted side of things. Certain tweaks have been made to streamline Austen’s text, most notably the tragic backstory of Colonel Brandon and Eliza, but it doesn’t feel like anything’s been lost.
And as the heart of the story, Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles have a beautiful, sisterly rapport, turning what can be stock character traits — Elinor’s “sense,” or prudence, and Marianne’s “sensibility,” or emotionality — into three-dimensionality. We can see the deep wells of passion behind Elinor’s eyes when she tries to restrain herself, and we watch wisdom dawn behind Marianne’s as she suffers.
If there’s something vaguely disappointing about this adaptation, it’s that it doesn’t entirely develop a fresh way into the story — or perhaps it hasn’t gone far enough in its approach. As with wildlife, well-bred women who have lost their fortunes find their lives dictated by mercurial forces, whether their disasters are natural or financial. Romance is all well and good, but what that means for their futures has far bigger implications.
Sense and Sensibility Rated PG. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters.
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