VERY MOVING. THE HEARTBREAK beneath the courtesies." So writes Emma Thompson in the production diary she has just published, together with her screenplay for Sense and Sensibility. Clever girl. For writing this impeccable adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. For giving it a still, deep center with her delicately repressed (and then superbly released) performance in one of the title roles--she's "Sense," otherwise known as Elinor Dashwood. For defining in seven words the essence of romantic comedy. And for understanding that well over a century before it became a movie genre, Austen had mastered its most basic conventions.
These include bringing handsome people--some of them silly, some of them wise, some of them rich, some of them poor--together in a variety of pleasing settings, arranging many misunderstandings and misalliances, equally productive of amusing conversations and embarrassing situations, then sorting everyone and everything out in the last chapter or act. It's a formula amply on display not only in Sense and Sensibility but also in Hollywood's major romantic offering of the Christmas season, Sabrina.
It's not as easy as it looks. The problem for the writer is to balance a wit that doesn't dry the piece out against sentiments that don't turn it soggy. For the actors it lies in playing highly stylized dialogue while remaining in touch with recognizable human nature. For the director, energy is the issue: too much of it and everyone goes bucketing off in the direction of farce; too little of it and the audience starts admiring the scenery. Or, to put the whole tricky business simply, everyone has to stay grounded in reality while at the same time subtly improving on it.
You can measure the accomplishment of Sense and Sensibility simply by observing that it meets all these contradictory standards. It does so while presenting us with a vast range of richly developed, gorgeously played characters ("Can everyone in England act?" Thompson reports director Ang Lee asking after one particularly fruitful casting session) and moving them gracefully through time and a lot of very pretty spaces without ever losing its conviction, its concentration or our bedazzled attention.
Consider what dear Ms. Thompson's dear Miss Dashwood has to deal with. She is in unrequited love with Mr. Ferrars (Hugh Grant, marvelously blending probity and arrested development), who has foolishly promised himself to another. But of this misery she dare not speak, for other circumstances require that she be a brick: the death of her father and the loss of Norland, the stately digs where she and her all female family have been safe and content; the genteel but palpable anxiety of her mother (Gemma Jones), trying to be brave as poverty and spinsterhood loom for her girls; the hysterically misplaced passion of her sister Marianne (Kate Winslet)--the "Sensibility" of the title--nearly dying when that cad John Willoughby (Greg Wise) leaves her for a woman better endowed financially; the romantic occlusion that prevents Marianne from seeing what everyone else can see, that the good Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), despite a certain stiffness in his emotional joints, is her savior.