3.5 stars
STARRING: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esme Creed-Miles, Herbert Nordrum, George MacKay, Caitriona Balfe
RATING: PG
IN CINEMAS: Now
Based on TV shows such as Bridgerton and The Great, and movies like Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, you could be forgiven for thinking period dramas must be bracingly contemporary to be worthy of your time.
With Sense And Sensibility, British director Georgia Oakley and Australian screenwriter Diana Reid prove one needn’t go full iconoclast like Fennell to breathe life into centuries-old material.
Instead, the first all-female duo in these roles to adapt Jane Austen’s debut novel have given us something revelatory in another way.
Often period dramas can feel like a museum exhibit, or, in some of these edgy new iterations, as if they exist in an alternate reality we know never actually took place.
Oakley’s film is a naturalistic vision of Austen that is rooted in realism and bristles with vitality.
Published in 1811, the story follows the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, penniless after the death of their father, and struggling to find their place in proper society, with only a potential match with a well-heeled suitor offering salvation.
Elder sister Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is sensible to a fault, sacrificing her own happiness and feelings for the stoically dashing Edward (George MacKay) for the benefit of her family.
The impetuous Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles), meanwhile, is “Sensibility” incarnate, and would take death over a life lived without burning passion, which, of course, leads her into the arms of Willoughby (Frank Dillane), a handsome gent with lowkey cad vibes.
Fans of the book will be glad to know Fiona Shaw is ideally cast as Mrs Jennings, the tactless but wealthy widow, who takes the Dashwood girls under her wing.
MacKay is also especially wonderful, and though this film might seem like an odd audition tape for 007, give this man a licence to kill already.
But the real killer performances in Sense And Sensibility belong to Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles, who do the heavy lifting in a story that was always about the dynamic between these two sisters.
Though the title highlights the stark differences in personality, the ultimate message is the similarities win out in the end.
And the antagonist of the piece is no one man, but rather a patriarchal system of oppression that disenfranchised women in Austen’s time.
The way Oakley has brought the famed author’s work into modernity serves to highlight the parallels to our world today.
Is Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation probably better? Well, it’s a classic starring Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, so yes. But this latest version does Austen justice in a way that earlier film didn’t.