Sense & Sensibility
Jul. 1st, 2008 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI saw Sense & Sensibility today (the 1995 version; I have been informed that the more recent variation is subpar). Minor spoilers for both below.
I may have liked the movie more than the book, which is embarrassing. Sense & Sensibility is one of my least favorite Austen novels (I don’t much like Persuasion either); there are large tracts of the book that involve waiting around in a misery of anticipation, desperate for a smattering of information that could be gained by the expedient of actually communicating with the other characters.
I’m being unfair, I realize; there are good reasons why no one in Sense & Sensibility talks to anyone else; but that doesn’t make it feel less grimly oppressive. The movie skates over the great waiting sequences, which is a plus.
All the Dashwood girls are wonderful. Kate Winslet is brilliant and very lovely as Marianne (I should get more of her movies; she’s wonderful in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Heavenly Creatures too, so it can’t be a fluke). Emma Thompson seems a bit old to be Elinor, who’s supposed to be nineteen, not thirty, but her acting is good. The girl who plays Margaret (imdb.com tells me she’s Emelie Francois) is excellent too. And she has a tree house.
Speaking of Margaret: I really like the scene where Elinor and Edward Ferrars lure her out from under the table by speaking geographical nonsense. It’s a charming scene and it shows why they fall in love. I always felt a bit cheated because it happened off-stage in the book.
Willoughby is marvelous. I love the part where he spins Marianne around while explaining all the reasons he dislikes Colonel Brandon; he’s charming and lively and handsome (no wonder she’s in love) and just unkind enough that his perfidies seem entirely in character when they’re revealed.
The costumes and cinematography are beautiful, too. There are a smattering of shots where the camera seems to be peering down from the chandelier, which is odd yet works, and the landscape shots are lovely and short. (I've never liked long, lingering landscape shots. I recall film reviews of Brokeback Mountain, all eerily parroting each other about how Ang Lee had made the Wyoming landscape a character in the film with his incredible mountain shots, when in fact he had just bulked the thing up with boring useless footage.)
I’m also reading Mansfield Park, which seems good so far. It’s the last Austen book I haven’t read (the unfinished novels don’t count) so I feel very pleased and complete.
I may have liked the movie more than the book, which is embarrassing. Sense & Sensibility is one of my least favorite Austen novels (I don’t much like Persuasion either); there are large tracts of the book that involve waiting around in a misery of anticipation, desperate for a smattering of information that could be gained by the expedient of actually communicating with the other characters.
I’m being unfair, I realize; there are good reasons why no one in Sense & Sensibility talks to anyone else; but that doesn’t make it feel less grimly oppressive. The movie skates over the great waiting sequences, which is a plus.
All the Dashwood girls are wonderful. Kate Winslet is brilliant and very lovely as Marianne (I should get more of her movies; she’s wonderful in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Heavenly Creatures too, so it can’t be a fluke). Emma Thompson seems a bit old to be Elinor, who’s supposed to be nineteen, not thirty, but her acting is good. The girl who plays Margaret (imdb.com tells me she’s Emelie Francois) is excellent too. And she has a tree house.
Speaking of Margaret: I really like the scene where Elinor and Edward Ferrars lure her out from under the table by speaking geographical nonsense. It’s a charming scene and it shows why they fall in love. I always felt a bit cheated because it happened off-stage in the book.
Willoughby is marvelous. I love the part where he spins Marianne around while explaining all the reasons he dislikes Colonel Brandon; he’s charming and lively and handsome (no wonder she’s in love) and just unkind enough that his perfidies seem entirely in character when they’re revealed.
The costumes and cinematography are beautiful, too. There are a smattering of shots where the camera seems to be peering down from the chandelier, which is odd yet works, and the landscape shots are lovely and short. (I've never liked long, lingering landscape shots. I recall film reviews of Brokeback Mountain, all eerily parroting each other about how Ang Lee had made the Wyoming landscape a character in the film with his incredible mountain shots, when in fact he had just bulked the thing up with boring useless footage.)
I’m also reading Mansfield Park, which seems good so far. It’s the last Austen book I haven’t read (the unfinished novels don’t count) so I feel very pleased and complete.
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Date: 2008-07-02 04:11 am (UTC)