Watching any movie with Jane Austen ties inevitably sends me back to at least one of my favorites among the films and TV series based on her works. “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” was no exception.
It wouldn’t be “Emma” in her best or second best version I’d drop in on. My favorite Austen adaptation, the glorious Amanda Root, Ciaran Hinds “Persuasion” (NOT the Netflix/Dakota Johnson abomination) isn’t readily available. And who has time to immerse oneself in the definitive “Pride and Prejudice,” the 1995 TV series that launched the Austen fad and Colin Firth mania, and became the defining role in the glorious Jennifer Ehle’s career?
Emma Thompson’s witty and emotional adaptation of “Sense and Sensibilty” followed TV’s “Pride” by a few months, and Ang Lee’s sumptuous film became the gold standard for putting Austen on the big screen in a single film and not a spare-no-detail mini-series.
Touching moments from this classic linger in the memory in this story of “limited prospects” and grand romantic longing in Napoleonic (Empire Era) England. Writer and star Thompson and Kate Winslet, launching herself with a career-making turn, will break your heart and not just once.
But watching it anew, I was bowled over not by the dreaming and dreams dashed Dashwood sisters, who still move and make us identify with their crushes, missteps and heartfelt desperation to “marry for love” and a tidy inheritance. It’s the men who try to measure up to them that impress the most.
If there was ever a more romantic entrance in a period piece than Alan Rickman, galloping into the frame as Col. Brandon, all dash and hidden heartbreak and flowing hair, I can’t recall it. Famous on film as Everyvillain at the time, thanks to “Die Hard” and the Costner “Robin Hood,” Rickman practically reinvents himself in this portrait of gentility, grand gestures and upper class virility.
His Col. Brandon makes a pointed contrast not just to the younger and more handsome John Willoughby, played by tall, dark and handsome Greg Wise, his rival for the love of young Marianne (Winslet). Thompson cast him as counterpart to the shrinking violet she talked her pal Hugh Grant into playing, Edward Ferrars, her character’s love interest.
Rickman’s Brandon is chivalrous, charismatic, smitten with Marianne and gallant enough to accept her interest in a younger suitor is the polar opposite of Grant’s Ferrars.
Brandon dominates the room, even when he’s not in it. Ferrars physically shrinks when he walks into the company of women or anybody else. Watch the way Grant carries himself, shoulders hunched in, slightly bent, self-effacing and modest to a fault.
Rickman’s Brandon looks like a safe suspect if one was casting about looking for The Scarlet Pimpernel, at his most manly when on horseback. Grant in the saddle reminds one of the crack Rowan Atkinson’s “Blackadder” makes in the period piece sitcom by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. He rides “a horse rather less well than another horse would.”
The story is quintessential Austen. Three sisters (Thompson, Winslet and Myrian Henry Francois) and their widowed mother (Gemma Jones, terrific) are left in the lurch when their stepfather/husband (Tom Wilkinson) dies and legally, they’re left out of the will.
Their older half-brother (James Fleet) promised to look after them, but his greedy wife (Harriet Walter, perfectly vile) gradually talks him out of that charitable obligation.
If only Miss Elinor (Thompson) could meet a handsome heir who looks like Hugh Grant, but whose family won’t disown him for marrying “beneath” his station. If only younger sister Marianne’s (Winslet) head could be turned by someone rich and seemingly available like Willoughby/Wise.
If only their older, better off relatives (Elizabeth Spriggs and Robert Hardy) had stopped with the lovely gesture of taking the family in and providing them with a comfy cottage, instead of repeatedly embarrassing the girls by laying all their desperate-to-marry business out there to one and all.
The supporting characters provide the film’s comic relief, with stage veteran Spriggs an unsufferable, well-intentioned delight and Imogen Stubbs bringing Elinor’s rival for Ferrars, Lucy Steele, to dizzy, shallow insufferable light and Imelda Staunton and Hugh Laurie drawing blood as a chatterbox and her droll, muttering and insulting mate.
“Oh, if only this rain would stop!”
“If only YOU would stop.”
Thompson created Mr. Jennings as a character, made him a fine accomplice to Mrs. Jennings, and gave herself the film’s first zinger, on hearing her sister’s downcast piano playing in their house of mourning.
“Marianne, could you play something else? Mamma has been weeping since breakfast.
Grant has never been more charming, a shy suitor who indulges the family’s youngest daughter with role playing which he self-mocks when confessing what he’s doing to her sisters.
“She’s, eh, heading an expedition to China shortly. I am to go as her servant, but only on the understanding that I am to be very badly treated.”
Rickman is Thompson’s true match as a romantic lead, a man of action who sweeps into action when his moment arrives, and who cannot sit idly by waiting for a doctor to save his unrequited beloved, Marianne. Surely Elinor has some task he can fulfill while waiting.
“Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.”
“Sense and Sensibility” only collected one Oscar back in 1996, for Thompson’s adaptation of the Austen novel. When your competition is “Dead Man Walking,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “The Usual Suspects” and “Braveheart,” that’s understandable.
But this sunny period piece has a timelessness that has outlived some members of its cast, and more than one renewal of the great ongoing Jane Austen fad. Thompson and Ang Lee made perhaps the definitive Austen film, more in touch with its times than “Emma,” more romantic than “Pride and Prejudice” (Elizabeth Bennett falls hard for Mr. Darcy AFTER she takes in his mansion and estate), more fun than “Persuasion” or most any Austen adaptation that has come since.
Rating: PG
Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, Harriet Walter, Gemma Jones, James Fleet, Tom Wilkinson, Imelda Staunton, Greg Wise, Hugh Laurie, Imogen Stubbs and Alan Rickman.
Credits: Directed by Ang Lee, scripted by Emma Thompson, based on the novel by Jane Austen. A Columbia Pictures release on Apple TV+, Amazon, Hulu, other streamers
Running time: 2:16
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