Review: A new 'Sense and Sensibility,' feisty, raw and windswept, sparks up Jane Austen's sisters
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Set us as preferred The days are growing shorter, and, in between heat waves and Kelvin waves, you can almost feel autumn in the air and with it, the chance to put the kettle on without fear of heatstroke and cozy up to the idea that there’s yet another wave of Jane Austen adaptations upon us.Austen will never go out of style because we’re not going to reach a point when we stop worrying about money, status and the gobsmacking difficulty of telling someone you love them.
Earlier this year, BBC One gave us a “Pride and Prejudice” spinoff, “The Other Bennet Sister.” In December, Netflix will present a six-episode limited series of the novel itself.And in between, we have a new film version of “Sense and Sensibility,” which dares to trod on the same hallowed ground as the 1995 Ang Lee movie, a film that won Emma Thompson a screenplay Oscar, introduced most audiences to Kate Winslet and confirmed that there are few things more pleasurable than a flustered Hugh Grant.
How do you top that? You don’t.But more than 30 years on, there’s still room for another check-in with the Dashwood sisters.
If you haven’t already met, that’s Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), prudent, practical, the “sense” of the family, and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles), passionate and impulsive, the “sensibility.” Of course, as Whitman and Bob Dylan have noted, people are not just one thing.They contain multitudes, and so too do the Dashwood sisters.
Much of the pleasure of Austen’s novel and this new adaptation, directed by Georgia Oakley and written by Diana Reid, comes from watching the fiercely bonded young women navigate their temperamental differences and arrive at a place of mutual understanding.With due respect to the Dashwoods’ suitors (save for that scoundrel Willoughby), this is the love story of Oakley’s “Sense and...