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This is a lot of chaos for one provincial "control freak" (as Thompson describes her) to manage, and it's only natural that she submerge her interests while dealing with the muddle. Yet, by some patient alchemy, Thompson manages to hold our sympathetic concern despite her self-effacement. Precisely because of her witty, held-back playing, she finally achieves one of those privileged moments we are always hoping to find at the movies and so rarely do.
It occurs at the very last moment, when, suddenly, Mr. Ferrars appears at the remote cottage, located just this side of destitution, where the Dashwood ladies have taken refuge. Miraculously he is free of his entanglements, free at last to diffidently declare his love for Elinor. Whereupon she bursts into tears--not just tears but great, teacup-rattling sobs, a huge, whooshing release of long-suppressed emotions, both hers and ours. You feel like crying right along with her. You feel like laughing too. Mostly, though, you feel terrific, in touch with something authentic inside yourself.
This kind of joyous catharsis is what the old movie masters of romantic comedy--Frank Capra, Leo McCarey--sometimes delivered. You don't expect to find it in adaptations of classic literature. You don't expect to find it in modern movies. You certainly wonder how a Taiwan-born director like Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) has managed to reach across time and cultures to deliver these delicate goods undamaged. Maybe some of that whoosh of delight one feels at the end of Sense and Sensibility is for him, and his emergence as a world-class director.
One has to wonder: Did Sydney Pollack feel a different kind of whoosh--something like the sound of wind being removed from sails--when he first beheld Sense and Sensibility? Pollack is its executive producer, without whose enthusiasm, it is said, the movie might never have been made. He is one of the few contemporary American directors blessed with a genuinely romantic spirit (Out of Africa) and no small gift for comedy (Tootsie). He is also, by quirk of fate, Lee's chief competitor in the romantic-comedy market niche this season, as the producer-director of Sabrina.
This property also has a history: as a successful Broadway play, then as a Billy Wilder movie starring three beloved figures, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. And, as you'll recall, it has a nice little story to tell too. It's the one about the chauffeur's daughter (Julia Ormond), living over the garage on a vast Long Island estate, in love since childhood with David (Greg Kinnear), the playboy living up the driveway. When she grows up and he notices her, that threatens his engagement, which in turn threatens the merger of two family firms that Linus (Harrison Ford), his older brother and a grumpy workaholic, has been nurturing. The latter sets out to seduce Sabrina for purely business purposes and ends up himself seduced by this wise child.