Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen’s 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’s Oscar double – she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End – and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing.
With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen’s 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’s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen’s unique and toughly realistic concern with money and status – but on this more serious point, perhaps a rerelease is also due for Patricia Rozema’s very worthwhile interpretation of Mansfield Park from 1999, a darker and more political take on Austen.
Sense and Sensibility is a film stuffed with blue-chip British acting talent but, for me, Kate Winslet is the movie’s 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 François, the sisters find themselves evicted from their handsome estate due to a technicality of their late father’s will and forced to occupy a modest cottage elsewhere.
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’ cottage doesn’t look too awful. There is a tree house that looks staggeringly big.
It is in her relatively reduced circumstances that Elinor encounters the personable Edward Ferrars, brother to the spiteful and grasping Fanny Dashwood, the sisters’ relative by marriage played with vinegary glee by Harriet Walter. 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’t have imagined, but which works tremendously well. (Thompson invents for Edward and Elinor a tremendous gag about the location of the Nile.)
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’s heart is the manly and reticent Colonel Brandon, played by Alan Rickman with pride, decency and slot-mouthed hauteur.
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’s 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.
As for these men, well, it’s Colonel Brandon who has the estate and Edward Ferrars is content with the relatively modest clergyman’s living. God is not otherwise mentioned, other than in Marianne’s astonished encounter with her faithless suitor in London: “Good God, Willoughby!” 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.
• Sense and Sensibility is in UK cinemas from 8 August, and Australian cinemas from 10 August
