Adapting Jane: Sense and Sensibility

Silence is golden…until it isn’t. That is the general rule when I am crafting away. My craft of choice has been sewing, as you all could guess. Audiobooks and music are the best modes of added entertainment given their auditory nature. While I lean heavily on both, lately, I have been putting on movies while my machine and I are whizzing away—specifically, films based on Jane Austen’s works.

This isn’t the first time I have gone back through my collection of adaptations. I’m one of those people who can watch movies over and over again without getting bored. Austen’s works put to celluloid, in particular, are frequent repeats. When the mood struck me to time travel back to England’s Regency period for the five hundredth time, I had new ground to tread on.

Well, by “new,” I mean new to me, so, I am not talking about Autumn de Wilde’s Emma that had to endure a COVID release. I was scrolling through Prime’s offerings to find that Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility has competition. Sort of anyway. What I had discovered was a BBC production from 2008.

Play button pressed. Yes, please. Here are almost three hours of my life.

Comparing movies and miniseries isn’t fair when it comes down to it, especially when the source material is a novel. Miniseries have the benefit of time on the one hand. Movies, on the other hand, can have substantially larger budgets. In this case, we are talking about a romantic comedy written in 1811, so no one is green-lighting an Austen adaptation with a Star Wars sized budget. Or even a regular action movie sized budget. With those realities leveling the field, I will press on without too much guilt about fairness.

Speaking of action movies, here’s one for you- Howard Stark, The Governor, Matthew Crawley, and Arthur Weasley get together in the English countryside. Sounds like one of those terrible joke starters, doesn’t it? Instead, those are the men playing the male leads for this production of Sense and Sensibility.

It was very, very hard to watch the first episode. All I could think was this would be the perfect cast of men for a version of Sense and Sensibility a la Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies. We will not be discussing Sense, Sensibilities, and Sea Monsters. It was a terrible fit for the original story. Sea Monsters would have been a far more sensible pairing for Persuasion. I did eventually put this idea aside so that I could take in the show playing out in front of me rather than my wild imaginings.

Before I get too carried away, why don’t I shift away from the gentlemen for awhile?

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are the principal players here. I would throw Margaret in the mix, but I don’t get her point. At all. Book, movie, it doesn’t matter. She was unnecessary except to introduce awkwardness into the mix occasionally. Wasn’t that what Mrs. Jennings was for?

In 1995, audiences watched Emma Thompson step into the sensible shoes of Elinor. Thompson was responsible for the movie’s screenplay and won an Oscar for her efforts on the writing front. She did snag a nomination for acting. I was about to type- she was robbed of the win when I realized I had no idea who had taken the top prize for acting that year. Susan Sarandon. I’ve never seen Dead Man Walking, but I know enough to know that was a fair Oscar fight.

Since this is a blog and not an emotionless analysis of the two films, I will freely admit that Emma Thompson remains my favorite Elinor. My one commentary on her portrayal of the protagonist might sound nitpicky. Elinor Dashwood was nineteen years old in the novel. In 1996, Thompson was thirty-six at the time of filming. These things happen all the time in Hollywood, I know. And her being older than the character she was portraying did lend credence to the character’s self-possession and control.

So, what about her miniseries counterpart?

In the 2008 version, the actress stepping up to be the cool, calm, and collected Dashwood is Hattie Morahan. She’s closer to the age of the character but not by much. Morahan was thirty at the time the movie was released. I cannot help but ask, what does that say about the perception of young women?

Volumes upon volumes. But then again, Elinor ends up being more than just the measuring stick on young women’s emotional intelligence. On the page and the screen, she is less attractive than her younger sister. I’m not talking about looks. Her pragmatism set against Marianne’s vivacity is off-putting. Her own brother calls her a soon to be spinster. Yet, she is the one who navigates the women through the traumatic loss of home and fortune. Rodney Dangerfield would have something to say about that situation.

I’ll be kind to the others in the world of Sense and Sensibility, though. Marianne is one of those characters that’s hard to look away from. Talent, beauty, has a natural ease with anyone she meets, and men falling all over her. Ang Lee’s version wins in this casting for me here. Nothing against Charity Wakefield. She put in a lovely, nuanced performance. In some respects, she makes Marianne less reckless and imbued with the fringes of sense. But Kate Winslet is my favorite. She is Marianne Dashwood to me.

As an introvert, it’s impossible not to be jealous even if she is fictional. But she’s a hard character to like. She’s the quintessential damsel in distress—ad nauseam. How many times can she be caught in the rain? Seriously. I can’t even use the word heroine here for her. Even though that was the definition of one when the book was written, and Austen was totally taking a jab at that whole bullcrap.

Austen was such a snarky bitch. I love it.

Ang Lee is winning here if we’re keeping score, but I’m not done yet. I don’t even think I am getting back to the men. I’ll have to have a Men of Austen post to cover the men who have played heroes.

Now, to the story accuracy.

This is where that difference in format comes into play. The BBC miniseries makes use of that extra time. It has been long enough from me reading and rereading the novel that my knee jerk reaction was the 2008 version was taking liberties. After some time away from the initial shock, no, they were not taking liberties. I had watched the 1995 version enough to color my memory of the story.

And that means it’s time for me to bust out that beautiful covered copy of mine and get to it. So, if you are looking for an escape, I recommend a sojourn in Regency England. Perhaps an extended stay to visit both of these stories seeing as they are just different enough.

Until next time, Nerd Girls!