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Sense and SensibilityRating:
Release Date: 03 February, 2004 Retail Price: $14.94 OUR Price: $9.47 You SAVE: $5.47! Cast: Complete Cast (15 total) |
Sense and Sensibility Reviews
A fine adaptation that will please most viewers, sans Grant
This film looks beautiful with that particular fresh and green loveliness that typifies the gentlefolk's 18th / 19th century England. It's a delight to watch, and the screenplay itself is wonderfully done, combining the sensible and likeable characters with the truly absurd characters, not to mention those whose characters are morally enfeebled. Jane Austen's depiction of human frailty as well as goodness has always impressed me as being true and very apt, striking home not merely with insightful viewing of human beings but also the very particular aspects that define a person of English gentility in the 1800s.
Emma Thompson has certainly done a splendid job with the screenplay. Unlike the recent unfortunate adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice", this adaptation includes virtually all of the essential story threads, and gives appropriate screentime to all the characters. One becomes thoroughly engrossed not only in the travails of the two Dashwood sisters, but also all of those they encounter.
Kate Winslet is simply perfect as Marianne Dashwood, the sister with all the sensibility. She embodies every aspect of the character - her winsomeness, her charm, her gaiety, the immoderate way in which she throws herself into life, and her lack of prudence. In appearance and behaviour, no better Marianne could have been found.
Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon, the somewhat shy but intelligent gentleman of excellent morals and strong feelings, whose qualities Marianne learns to appreciate after the tumultuous miseries of her relationship with Willoughby, is excellent - which is no surprise. Is there a role in the world that Alan Rickman cannot play, and play more convincingly than anyone else?
Greg Wise as the unreliable Willoughby, whose dashing good looks and romantic persona gain Marianne's love but who ultimately proves to be a man of straw whose self-interest will always lead him to disappoint the hopes of others in pursuit of his own gain, is wonderfully cast.
The scheming Lucy Steele is played with extraordinary deftness by the excellent Imogen Stubbs, who portrays not only the machinating and self-serving aspects, but also the encroaching sweetness that deceives so many.
Every part, in fact, with the exception of two, is superbly cast.
I do consider the film has two flaws - the casting of Emma Thompson as Elinor, and far worse, the casting of Hugh Grant as Edward. Emma Thompson is a wonderful actress, but I find it impossible to think of her as Elinor, both on account of her being visibly too much older than the nineteen of Miss Dashwood in the novel, and also in her portrayal somehow seeming rather too ruefully pragmatic. I suppose I have always envisaged Elinor as being a different type - sensible, calm, yes, but not visibly self-dampening, and of course younger. Hugh Grant as Edward seems to me to have been the film's only major mistake. One does not sense from the novel that Edward is supposed to be a completely inarticulate gentleman, stiff-necked, addicted to such high cravats that he appears to be choking, and with scarcely any qualities that would lead one to suppose him the type likely to attract Elinor. I have always thought of him more as a calm and sensible young man with deep feeling, whose reluctance to communicate with Elinor after he realised he was falling in love with her was due ONLY to his knowledge of his existing entanglement with Miss Steele - not to a reticence and inarticulation that are embedded in his character.
I overcame my qualms with regard to the casting of Elinor - after all, Emma Thompson is never less than charming, and she is a wonderful actress indeed. But Hugh Grant as Edward strikes me EVERY time I watch this DVD as... simply wrong.
Yet in spite of these things, the film works beautifully in almost every way for me. I'd prefer to give the film 4 and a half stars rather than five, but without that option, let it be five.
Abandon the few qualms and enjoy the delicious beauties and witty understanding of human nature in this delightful period piece.
There's still hope if you hated it...
I like this movie. But it was not always so. When I first viewed Sense and Sensibility about a year before, I stopped it after ten minutes. Later on, I underwent a kind of reformation caused by my wife forcing me to watch Pride and Prejudice with her three times (1995 version with Ehle & Firth). Something must have happened to my mind. I sort of snapped, I suppose, because next I read the novel Pride and Prejudice twice in a week. I became bewitched by Jane Austen and her tales of romantic delight and pain played out on the stage of nineteenth century English gentry society. So, if you did not like this movie, I recommend that you try reading some of Miss Austen's work. Then watch it again. It is an excellent production with wonderful photography and good sound depicting English countryside and gentry life two hundred years ago. The performances are believable and the characters are likeable, or not, as appropriate to the novel. If you try my idea and still do not like this movie, you may be a hopeless action movie junkie which is okay, too. At least you will have tried.
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