The New Sense and Sensibility Is a Different Kind of Jane Austen Movie. I Loved It.

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The idea of a Jane Austen movie might evoke the stuffiness of drawing rooms, but Georgia Oakley’s beautiful new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is pastoral, a visual feast made up of dark-blue dresses, cascading brunette hair, birds in flight, beloved steeds, a younger sister’s incandescent freckles smeared with blackberry juice. Jane Austen’s 1811 novel contains a memorable scene in which the inappropriately authentic Marianne Dashwood spies her love at a ball and heatedly confronts him regarding his lack of reply to her letters, like no other Regency debutante would dare. In this movie, Marianne (Hanna’s Esmé Creed-Miles) sees the man while she’s standing at the refreshment table, having given up on the use of silverware for picking up a rather unwieldy poached pear and instead brought it to her mouth in her gloved hand. “Willoughby!” she yells, around a mouthful of pulp. That’s Oakley’s movie in a nutshell: Visceral, hilarious, as committed as Marianne herself to uncovering the feeling of passion.

To adapt Sense and Sensibility requires the casting of two Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, close in age but far apart in temperament, who are challenged by upheaval in their lives after their father dies and all his property falls to their weak half-brother and his avaricious wife. Elinor is sensible, calm, a classic “eldest daughter,” played with dignity and self-possession by Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones. Marianne is labile, expressive, big-R romantic. She’s also borderline annoying if you are Elinor or an Elinor-identified reader or watcher. Creed-Miles’ round eyes and face are lit with fire in her happy scenes and blanched white in disappointment and depression in her sad ones, as when Elinor advises her to exercise caution in love and Marianne spits back at her, “How awful it must be to expect so little, and to always, always be right.”

The sisters have a mother (Outlander’s Caitríona Balfe) and a tween sister (Hamnet’s Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and their family harmony (so distinct from the Bennets’ discord in Pride and Prejudice) is a source of friendly warmth, even as the foursome comes to live in a drafty cottage, accepting the cheerful half-charity of distant relatives. These relations, loud people who are always attended by a surging pack of dogs, supply a handy dose of humor, as when the well-meaning Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) prattles on through hours and hours of a carriage ride. Through their time at the cottage, and then during a visit to London, the Dashwood sisters contemplate the possibility of romance: Elinor with Edward Ferrars (George MacKay, who played the soldier who dashed through the trenches in 1917), the handsome and humble brother of her sister-in-law, and Marianne with Willoughby (Frank Dillane), a charismatic guy with a gorgeous smile who likes to let loose, whether when riding horses, laughing, or cutting a rug.

This movie finds inventive new ways to show the progress of these fledgling loves, neither of which reach the status of a formal engagement. The dance sequences, in which Marianne and Willoughby (at a country get-together) and Elinor and Edward (at a ball in London) execute the sort of exuberant, expressive moves I’d never seen in a period piece before, raised the hackles of at least one expert. Apparently, genteel women in Regency England did not do backbends or dramatically sweep their arms around their partners, as happens at these parties. I can’t find it within myself to bristle, so effectively did the choreography convey first the single-minded, world-obliterating chemistry between high-spirited Marianne and the cad Willoughby, and then, the longing between the more sedate Edward and Elinor. If Bridgerton can have its lovers waltzing much more boringly to the even more anachronistic sounds of Taylor Swift, why not?

This adaptation has zhuzhed up a few other aspects of the story that are (according to some) weaknesses, or (according to others) part of the source material’s era-appropriate subtlety. What I’m trying to say is, Georgia Oakley has turned Colonel Brandon into a Chad. The story must, after setting up these two relationships for the two sisters, rip apart both nascent couples, then build Elinor and Edward back up, while writing out the feckless Willoughby and substituting the older Colonel Brandon, a steady and quiet family friend, as Marianne’s love interest. In Ang Lee’s beloved 1995 adaptation, the fiery Marianne (Kate Winslet) ends the story weakly sitting on the lawn, recuperating from an illness and listening to Brandon (Alan Rickman) read Shakespeare sonnets. Some viewers love this scene, but Oakley’s film, like Marianne herself, wants more. In this adaptation, Brandon (The Worst Person in the World’s Herbert Nordrum) challenges Willoughby to a duel, then deliberately throws away his shot, evincing both initiative and courage. This ending scans much more easily: Marianne doesn’t turn toward Brandon out of some kind of exhaustion; she sees they share a stubborn attachment to the ideal of sincerity.

Speaking of the Ang Lee adaptation, in that film, Emma Thompson (who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie, as well as being nominated for Best Actress for her role as Elinor) wrote her character an extremely effective moment of catharsis. In the penultimate scene, Edward (Hugh Grant) comes to the Dashwoods’ cottage and clears up a misunderstanding—he’s not, as she had believed, married, and the two are free to wed. After upholding every social convention for the whole movie, Elinor breaks down in joyful tears, right there in the parlor, in front of a visitor. It’s a moment of release that rivals the gorgeous final kiss screenwriter Diana Reid wrote into her movie for Edward and Elinor—a clinch the film is using for one of its posters. Some may prefer the older version, with its careful adherence to the period’s arm’s-length social conventions. I have room in my heart for both.