Subversive spirit and satirical energy: Sense and Sensibility reviewed in 1996

On the face of it, the Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee and England’s most-adapted dead lady novelist might seem as perverse a pairing as Sense and Sensibility’s threatened union of Lucy Steele and Edward Ferrars – or indeed the marriage of convenience at the core of Lee’s earlier film The Wedding Banquet in which a young, gay Taiwanese man gets hitched to an art student from Shanghai in order to deflect his parents’ attention from his true sexuality. In practice, Lee’s Sense and Sensibility is easily the most enjoyable – and, more significantly, the least complacent – of the recent rash of Jane Austen adaptations. 

While screenwriter-star Emma Thompson is already a likely Academy Award contender, the film’s flavour owes as much to Lee’s expertise as an observer of familial and social codes, constraints and conflict as it does to her droll feminist-revisionist script. Described by critic Tony Tanner as “a society which forced people to be at once very sociable and very private,” the world of Sense and Sensibility has more than superficial affinities with the world of The Wedding Banquet – in which revellers invade the newlyweds’ bedroom and refuse to leave until bride and groom are naked in bed together – or the world of Lee’s more recent Eat Drink Man Woman – in which three young Taipei career women sit down resentfully each night in obedience to the ritual of a meal cooked by their chef father. All three films focus on narrow social worlds in which private desires and emotions are subordinated to strict regulation by tradition, social mores and the law of the parent while at the same time being subjected to incessant public scrutiny.

Sense and Sensibility is about how two sisters of contrasting temperaments, Elinor (who has too much sense) and Marianne (who has too much romantic sensibility) deal – or fail to deal – with such contradictions. Where Elinor entirely conceals her feelings for Edward even as he haltingly tries to declare his love for her, Marianne cannot hide her emotions for five minutes even if this means being rude or cruel. To a modern audience, Marianne’s spontaneous directness is more appealing than Elinor’s self-repression, but in the society she inhabits, such openness is a transgression – hence the mass shock which greets her reproach of Willoughby at the ball (“Good God, Willoughby! Will you not shake hands with me?”). As Marianne’s subsequent psychosomatic illness hints, lone rebellion against such powerful social forces can be a route to madness.

A particular preoccupation in Thompson’s script is the problem of female non-inheritance. Where in the novel the torturous terms on which Elinor and Marianne’s father inherited Norland Park from an uncle leave him powerless to pass it on to his wife and daughters, the film tells us that their inheritance is denied them by the law. (“Boys inherit, girls don’t,” Elinor bluntly tells Margaret.) The deathbed scene in which Mr Dashwood breaks the news to their half-brother John that his will contains barely any provision for the women gives us every reason to think this law is sanctioned by the father. This feminist sensibility extends to the reinvention of Elinor and Marianne’s teen sister Margaret as a tomboy with a taste for tree houses and adventure – Emile François, who plays her, is as impressive a find as Anna Paquin was in The Piano. 

Where Sense and Sensibility really scores, though, is in a broad, self-mocking satirical energy, pleasingly at odds with both the politeness of older Austen adaptations and the sexed-up, patronising ‘updating’ of the BBC’s recent Pride and Prejudice. The hunting-and-shooting Sir John Middleton is a figure of Dickensian boisterousness whose ribald prying into Elinor and Marianne’s affairs of the heart is intrusive enough to make even the viewer squirm. Edward, on paper one of the dullest suitors in literary history, is here transformed – in a miraculous departure from Hugh Grant’s recent form – into a mumbling super-nerd muffled so deep in shyness that when he does speak his meaning stays runically opaque. (One hilarious scene has Thompson trying to coax a baffling sentence from him while his own horse snorts in disgust.)

On the down side, Grant’s performance begs the question of what on earth Elinor sees in Edward – but then this Sense and Sensibility’s attitude to romance is tongue-in-cheek. The movie’s prime amorous interest, Willoughby (played by Thompson’s real-life lover Greg Wise), is unquestionably a sex god in waiting; but Wise’s performance – from his entry on a white charger to his smarmy courtship of the breathless Marianne – is bracketed in such colossal ironic quote marks that it’s impossible not to laugh even as you swoon. This subversive spirit even enables Lee to pull off the trick the novel never managed, namely persuading us that Marianne really has shifted her affections to Brandon – but then, Austen’s rheumaticky Colonel has been granted the dry wit of Alan Rickman. Sense and Sensibility might just be the heritage movie that girls who like boys who hate heritage movies will get away with taking those boys to see.

► Sense and Sensibility returns to UK cinemas on 8 August.