None of my friends will go see Sense and Sensibility, no matter how I talk it up to them. They all hate Emma Thompson. Jane Austen is just excruciating. Hugh Grant is passe. It's a shame that Kate Winslet picked this for a follow-up, since she was so good/cute in Heavenly Creatures. Alan Rickman is terrific; too bad he's resorted to appearing in a stodgy old costume drama. Howards End put them into a coma, and they're still way too drowsy to go see another 'literary' picture. Ang who? And anyway, it's probably going to win the Oscar for Best Picture, so how good could it be?
Well, pretty damn good, actually. If you won't listen to Siskel, the Academy or the National Society of Film Critics, listen to me -- the guy who gave Peter Jackson's gorefest Braindead (aka Dead Alive) four stars and refuses on principle ever to see another Merchant Ivory film. Enjoying Sense and Sensibility is like giving yourself over to the sensual perks of a terrific piece of cheesecake, a long hot bath, or a good foot massage. You just have to sit back, relax, let go of any mental blocks you might have built up, and let the performers do their thing for you.
They're hired in the service of an old-style soap opera. Sense and Sensibility details what happens to the women of the Dashwood family -- the mother (Gemma Jones) and daughters Elinor (Thompson), Marianne (Winslet), and Margaret (Emilie Francois) -- when Mr. Dashwood dies and leaves his estate to his son, John (by law, houses go from father to son, not father to daughter). John's wife, Fanny, won't permit him to care for the women as his father requested, and they are forced to accept the charity of a cousin, Sir John Middleton, into whose house they move. In the course of the story, the women encounter gallantry and romance aplenty, for better or for worse (naturally, they learn their lessons from the worse and learn to embrace the better by film's end).
Don't let me pretend the film hasn't any flaws. The double happy ending is welcome, but seems to come too easily after all the struggle that precedes it. As gorgeous as the cinematography is, it's a little too lush, too precise in its colors and motion for my taste. Director Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet) is a fine storyteller, but he falls back on a few too many mannered compositions. As the most ebullient of the Dashwood, Winslet enthuses so much, so consistently (except when bedridden), that her character actually seems a little stiff over the course of the whole movie. Playing Edward Ferrars, the already-spoken-for object of Elinor's affections, Hugh Grant remains unmistakably, well, Hugh Grant, and you get the distinct feeling that he's given up even trying to get a handle on individual characters, opting instead to portray the ever-stammering archetype of himself over and over again. Francois makes a distractingly precious little girl in the mode of Kirsten Dunst from Interview With the Vampire (and the far-too-severe Oscar winner Anna Paquin from The Piano). And etcetera.
But permit me my gushing: Thompson is amazing in her mostly quiet way (a relief from her serious script-chewing in Much Ado About Nothing). When she burst into sobs in a key scene, I swear half the house behind me was choking in sympathy, making their own private noises. To a great extent, Sense and Sensibility really is Thompson's movie -- she wrote the screenplay, of course -- and it's quite a piece of work. I don't mean to belittle the contribution of the director or a fine ensemble cast, but I wouldn't be surprised if Thompson next takes it upon herself to direct a picture (would this be a worse idea than letting Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner take the reins of a Hollywood film?). It remains to be seen exactly how good she'd be, but if her next film has the high spirits and stubborn contentedness of this one, I'm sure it will be, above all, quite a pleasure.