Cert – U, Run-time – 2 hours 12 minutes, Director – Georgia Oakley
After the passing of their father, Davenport sisters Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) navigate a new world of loves outside of the familiar grandness of their former home.
One of the most striking emotions in Georgia Oakley’s retelling of Sense And Sensibility doesn’t come from a sense of passion, lust or melodrama. It doesn’t involve running or staring longingly in the pouring rain; it comes from our empathy towards someone experiencing shattering heartbreak. Akin to the feeling of loss, a sense of confused betrayal that you want to ignore. We see both elder Davenport sisters, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) go through these emotions, perhaps so intensely for the first time, as they navigate the world outside of the grandness of their former home – having left and moved to a cottage by the Devonishire coast, although still visiting lavish homes of high society figures, after their father left their home to his son (Tom Brooke) in his will.
The upper classes give us a range of characters from Fiona Shaw’s excitable scene-stealer Mrs Jennings, who takes delight in everyone, and setting up ‘matches’, and Turlough Convery’s wealthy huntsman Sir John Middleton – giving Tom Bombadil a run for his money when it comes to jovial hospitality – to sister-in-law Fanny Davenport (Stacy Martin), in some ways the true villain of the piece with her grudges against the family she sees as getting in the way of her potential riches; the best ways to describe her cannot be uttered in polite society. Each has a distinction, each a humour. While a familiarity in tone is present this is far from a dry and dreary, or even soppy and overplayed, period romance.
There’s a modernity to the emotions at play thanks to the performances at hand, whilst keeping in place with the time period via the dialogue and general design. How this’ll play with the current teenage audiences – in the vein that 2005’s Pride And Prejudice did, and still does, for example – remains to be seen, but I think there’s a different kind of connection that can be formed here thanks to the performances, and Oakley’s lack of force.
While the different stages through which we follow the Davenports (which also include Bodhi Rae Breathnach as youngest sibling Margaret and matriarch Catriona Balfe) can sometimes feel as if they push the run-time slightly beyond comfortably fitting, there’s still an emotional resonance to be found. The push-and-pull created by and with love interests such as George MacKay’s charming, wistful, at-times distant Edward Ferrars and Herbert Nordrum’s guarded Colonel Brandon, whose straight-faced regard, and growing potential feelings for Marianne, are treated with an occasional wry smile from behind the camera, particularly by screenwriter Diana Reid.
I was taken in and, again whilst eventually feeling the run-time, the film’s attitude to the emotions of its characters, letting them speak for themselves as they emerged in the moment, remains engaging. There’s a period romance here that leans traditionally in its tone, but creates a striking resonance in how we feel for the characters and their romantic plights.
With striking emotional modernity amongst traditional tones Sense And Sensibility doesn’t force us to feel the emotions of its characters, and instead has us feel for them in their moments of heartbreak and romantic wistfulness and levity.
