8 hours ago
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There’s no reason for anyone working on a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to be intimidated by the celebrated 1995 movie by director Ang Lee and screenwriter Emma Thompson, any more than they should be or overawed by Austen’s original novel. Sacred cows are there to be … not slain, but re-invented. The decision to bring out a next-gen Sense and Sensibility, with a new young cast – as opposed to, say, a new Northanger Abbey or a new spin on the unfinished The Watsons – might bemuse some and at first it bemused me, like hearing about a Love Actually remake starring Millie Bobby Brown. But this turns out to be a more downbeat, ruminative version, happening in much cloudier weather than 30 years ago and without the sugar-rush final wedding scene. The mood is cooler, but interestingly austere, sober and thoughtful. There are also some strange casting decisions.
The sisters at the heart of the story, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, played in 1995 by Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, are now played by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, and frankly don’t look and sound much like the sisters we thought we knew. They look like young women who knew each other reasonably well at uni and are now in a flatshare in London. It is a story of financial and romantic crisis. Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters, having happily occupied a handsome Sussex estate, are forced to move to humble Barton Cottage in Devon when Mrs Dashwood’s stepson John Dashwood inherits their property and effectively evicted them.
Before this can happen, Elinor meets and falls for young Edward Ferrars, a shy and decent young man of a well-to-do family, reticently portrayed by George MacKay. Here, in fact, it should be said that Diana Reid’s script and Georgia Oakley’s direction put into valuably sharper focus something left unstressed in 1995: that Mrs Dashwood (Caitríona Balfe) is pointedly insisting on moving away to the west country rather than endure the indignity of her daughter seeming to be a gold-digger.
It is in the wilds of Devon that Elinor broods unhappily on why Edward isn’t proposing marriage, and where the headstrong, romantic Marianne twists her ankle while out for a walk and is carried back to the cottage by dishy dreamboat-cad Mr Willoughby. The latter is played by Frank Dillane with a certain amount of insidious charm, but also a sort of Uriah Heep smirk. And Marianne does not see the integrity and all-round loveliness of the gallant ex-soldier who is poignantly in love with her: Colonel Brandon, heavily and inexplicably played behind hefty facial hair by Norwegian actor Herbert Nordrum.
Now, no actor would want to follow Alan Rickman from 1995 in the role of Colonel Brandon. But Nordrum, genuinely great in Joachim Trier’s Oslo-set comedy drama The Worst Person in the World, is just an eccentric, stolid outlier in this context; his line-readings feel unengaged and he doesn’t seem to be that moonstruck by Marianne, or particularly enthused by anything much at all. Of course, some of the film’s (worthwhile) intention is to push against envelopes and stereotypes and I quite enjoyed the gender-challenging casting of Eliot Sumner, icily playing Mr Palmer. But Brandon feels uncomfortable.
The scene-stealer is the mischievous, gossipy and forthright Mrs Jennings, marvellously played by Fiona Shaw, who brings up the voltage every time she comes on and effectively makes of it a far bigger role than Elizabeth Spriggs in the same part in 1995. Overall, the movie always looks and sounds perfectly good, though some of the sensibility is lacking.
