CINEMA: Digby Ricci
ALTHOUGH, like her most captivating heroine Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen never ridicules “what is wise or good”, there is nothing cosily consoling about this most clear- sighted of satirists. With a moral aversion rendered all the more devastating by what Rebecca West called “the lattice-work of her neat sentences”, Austen excoriates a host of repellent figures, ranging from sycophantic clergymen to viciously snobbish aristocrats and glib, sexually predatory men.
Austen’s perceptive heroines struggle, often agonisingly, to achieve a complex reconciliation of proper pride and self-critical awareness, of warmth of feeling and acute judgment, and, thus, the title of Sense and Sensibility (Austen’s first published novel, which appeared in 1811) presents an antithesis which its creator regards as destructive. The sustained conflict of two such integral components of the human psyche cannot make for happiness. Reason must be the character, certainly, but the horses of passion must be given their heads on appropriate occasions.
Elinor, the more sensible of Sense and Sensibility’s paired heroines, nevertheless possesses “strong” feelings and gives vent to them when such expressions of emotion are not harmful to others. The passionate Marianne is described as “sensible and clever”, but her delight in emotional outbursts causes her to obliterate her own considerable intellect. Near death from unrequited love instructs her in the necessity of exercising her understanding.
The successful director of Sense and Sensibility must avoid caricaturing either human force. Fortunately, Ang Lee, who commented in a recent Vanity Fair intreview: “Austen is a combination of sharp satire and emotional drama. It’s usually seen as sense being Elinor and sensibility, Marianne. But I think everybody has both in them,” is more than equal to the task of directing such subtly moving material.
The febrile romanticism of Marianne is conveyed by the film’s oppressively splendid exteriors: almost luridly green expanses of lawn are captured in panoramic long shot, beneath skies constantly altering from azure, to slate, to black. Storm light seems to bathe most of the landscapes, and Lee appears to have selected the humanity- dwarfing landscapes of German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich as visual inspiration.
The interiors — turquoise, blue- grey, and dominated by massive paintings — suggest the necessary restraints of control, while skilfully hinting at the dangers of its excesses. There is a sense of visual as well as emotional release when Colonel Brandon reveals the truth about the callously licentious Willoughby. He does so against a background of dramatic, red wallpaper, and his hands stray compulsively over rich furnishings.
Emma Thompson’s adaptation omits some memorably satirised characters, and rather sentimentally enlarges the role of the youngest Dashwood sister, Margaret. Taken in all, though, her screenplay is pleasingly faithful most of the time, and wittily apt when it strays. To offer one instance, Austen’s inhumanly “rational” Fanny Dashwood does not say disapprovingly of the Norland library: “These are mostly foreign. I have never liked the smell of books,” but this is just the kind of Philistine observation she would make.
The members of Lee’s cast, with one glaring exception, do Austen proud. With her honey-coloured hair and rosebud mouth, Kate Winslet’s Marianne is perfect, both ravishing and infuriating, and, although slightly old for the role, Thompson manages to give Elinor both impressive intelligence and human warmth. Greg Wise, as Willoughby, manages to express the character’s mercenary shallowness with chilling accuracy. Alan Rickman is a wrenchingly good Colonel Brandon; and Harriet Walter, despite the fact that she has been made to look like a Regency Cruella DeVille, is authentically vicious as Fanny Dashwood.
Austen’s Edward Ferrars is an awkwardly reserved man who, nevertheless, has a “lively” imagination and “just and correct” understanding. The unengaging Hugh Grant offers an overgrown schoolboy with delusions of allure. This is a role that cried out for the versatility and rugged charm of Kenneth Branagh. What a loss for this otherwise magnificent film that he could not play it.