Ang Lee (1995)
Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, with a screenplay by Emma Thompson, was released in British cinemas a few weeks after the BBC’s transmission of a six-part Pride and Prejudice, written by Andrew Davies and directed by Simon Langton. This Pride and Prejudice was not only a big hit at the time; it proved to be influential in subsequent adaptations of Jane Austen and in updating popular perceptions of Austen’s world. It also advanced the screen acting career of Colin Firth, who played Mr Darcy. This was thanks largely to the sequence, invented by Andrew Davies, in which Darcy emerges from swimming in a lake, clothed but transparently soaked through. That sequence, described by Fiachra Gibbons in the Guardian in 2003 as ‘one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history’, epitomises how the 1995 Pride and Prejudice revitalised Jane Austen in the public imagination. It was seminal in developing what now seems to be a truth universally acknowledged – that it’s possible for men in Austen novels to be hunks. They might even get-their-kit-off (sort of). According to Wikipedia, it was watching this Pride and Prejudice that inspired Helen Fielding to write Bridget Jones’s Diary. Fielding’s novel featured a love interest named for Mr Darcy and played, when the book reached the big screen in 2001, by Colin Firth.
The 1995 Sense and Sensibility, though humorous enough, is never frivolous: it’s a welcome corrective to the dripping Darcy school of Austen adaptation. Ang Lee’s film was screened this month as one of the events of ‘Fools for Love – Jane Austen Day’ at BFI and introduced by people in Austen-style costumes. They demonstrated the language of the fan[1]. They joked in olde-English. They felt sure we would adore Sense and Sensibility before the lucky ones among us headed for the climax of the day’s proceedings, a Regency ball in the Benugo bar. For a killjoy like me, Lee’s movie was a welcome corrective to all this too. There’s scarcely a juddering fan to be seen throughout the film, which stresses the implications of a patrilineal inheritance system, the large differences in wealth within families, the consequently and grimly serious business of making a suitable marriage. All these things are salient in Emma Thompson’s screenplay. The Taiwanese Ang Lee comes to the material from another country as well as a different century. He brings to bear, in combination with an outsider’s eye, a nearer personal understanding of, to use Lee’s own words, the tension of ‘social repression against free will’. His perspective sharpens the focus on that tension and on the themes stressed by Thompson. This supplies the film with a sustained astringent streak, which steers it well clear of comfortable, frocks-and-balls nostalgia.
Sense and Sensibility is long (136 minutes), and feels long, compared with Douglas McGrath’s remarkably streamlined Emma, released the following year, but it’s always intelligent and absorbing. The visual scale is eloquent: Lee and his cinematographer, Michael Coulter, consistently present rooms, houses and grounds of varying size to convey, without over-emphasising, different gradations on the social scale. There are times when the movie verges on being excessively glum, an impression reinforced by parts of Patrick Doyle’s score and the repeatedly foul weather in which the sequences outdoors take place. The ending, though, is close to startling, and impressive in its abrupt change of tone. The viewer’s participation in the wedding celebrations of both Elinor and Marianne Dashwood is abbreviated. Lee pulls up and away from the friends and family greeting the two pairs of newlyweds, as they emerge from church. He focuses instead on an isolated figure on horseback, watching from a regretful distance, high on a hillside. This man is John Willoughby, who broke Marianne Dashwood’s heart because, we learn, he didn’t have the money to marry for love.
Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet are very effectively complementary as the contrasting Dashwood sisters, Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility). Emma Thompson shows a confident awareness of the camera: her playing is understated but always emotionally expressive. The familiar whining twang in her voice grates occasionally but this is a first-rate characterisation: Thompson’s Elinor is finely poised between maturing beauty and lifelong spinsterhood. As a result of Thompson’s restraint, Elinor’s momentary loss of self-control is powerful and affecting, when she learns, with incredulous relief, that the man she loves, Edward Ferrars, isn’t married after all. (Elinor has just heard talk of ‘Mr Ferrars’ and his new bride, the former Lucy Steele. It turns out that Lucy, who was engaged to Edward, jilted him in favour of his brother, Robert.) Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh had shown in their interpretations of Beatrice and Benedick in Branagh’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (1993) how to play Shakespeare refreshingly and respectfully. Thompson achieves something similar with her translation of Jane Austen from page to screen, and in her portrait of Elinor.
Kate Winslet, in only her second cinema role (after Heavenly Creatures, the previous year), is splendid. Winslet has, from the start, a funny cussedness. Shortly after their father’s death, Marianne sits at the piano playing a doleful piece; Elinor suggests that she change her tune out of respect for their grieving mother (Gemma Jones) and Winslet switches decisively, to an even more miserable piece of music. Winslet has a wonderful emotional vibrancy and openness in the first half of the film. She shows us more as Marianne develops from an impulsively romantic girl into one whose eventual marriage to a second-best suitor makes sense to her, as well as to the audience. Completely in love with Willoughby (Greg Wise) and puzzled as to why he hasn’t already proposed to her, Marianne unexpectedly sees him at a London soiree: her strength of feeling and lack of caution propel her immediately in his direction. Her approach to him – this is not the done thing – is a lovely moment that makes Willoughby’s subsequent rejection of Marianne all the more poignant. Unlike her naturally contained, watchful elder sister, Marianne has to master the art of masking her feelings. There’s a virtual correspondence between this process and Kate Winslet’s progress in the course of the film. We can see that, at this stage of their careers, Emma Thompson was a more sophisticated performer; we also see Winslet, before our eyes, getting triumphantly to grips with the art of screen acting. It’s a delight to watch.
So is Elizabeth Spriggs. She is Mrs Jennings, the mother-in-law of Sir John Middleton (Robert Hardy), the wealthy cousin of Mrs Dashwood who offers her and her daughters residency of a small cottage on his Devon estate. Playing a garrulous, eccentric nosey-parker, Elizabeth Spriggs is theatrically comic but her histrionics are anchored in a rounded (in every sense) humanity. Spriggs’s performance is an object lesson in how to make a Jane Austen character characterful without making her tedious. As Mrs Jennings’s even more loquacious daughter, Charlotte, Imelda Staunton pairs up beautifully with Spriggs. Staunton gives herself so fully to the role that she’s empathetic with the often ridiculous Charlotte. She never seems to be taking the piss – something that Harriet Walter, as the Dashwood sisters’ snotty sister-in-law, teeters on the brink of doing. Twelve-year-old Emilie François is excellent as Margaret, Elinor’s and Marianne’s younger sister.
What a pity that Elinor Dashwood’s heart belongs to Hugh Grant. As Edward Ferrars, he tries but what seems meant to be a charmingly distrait manner looks and sounds phony. Because he always seems a fraud, Grant’s only good moment comes when Edward’s secret betrothal to Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs) is revealed – when, in other words, Elinor discovers he’s not what she imagined him to be. It’s much harder to see why she was bowled over by Edward in the first place and continues to love him even while he’s spoken for. None of the contributions from the men in the cast compares with the star turns from the women but Grant’s performance is the only real weakness, and there’s good work from Hugh Laurie, James Fleet and Oliver Ford Davies. Laurie, as Charlotte’s husband, switches persuasively from laconic sarcasm, in the face of his wife’s relentless yattering, to quiet sympathy with Elinor, when Marianne is gravely ill. James Fleet, as John, the elder half-brother of Elinor and Marianne, has a winning unease about inheriting entirely the estate of their late father (Tom Wilkinson). Ford Davies, alert and urgent, is the doctor who supervises Marianne’s recovery. Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon is interesting casting. Brandon loves Marianne at first sight – although she’s not the first woman he’s loved – but his feelings are not reciprocated (even when they finally marry). Rickman’s weary, sonorous voice and disappointed look, although distinctive, set him up a shade obviously as a thwarted romantic spirit but he’s engaging, and there’s a particularly striking detail in his playing of Brandon. At moments of high anxiety, Rickman feels for a piece of furniture like a blind man needing support from it.
21 November 2015
[1] I mean fan as in device for creating an air current – not fan as in devotee …
