A Senseless Austen Adaptation

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the art of making movies is the art of remaking movies. Nowhere is that truer than with Jane Austen adaptations.A new film version, of her first novel “Sense and Sensibility,” published in 1811 and credited only to “A Lady,” opens in theaters tomorrow. It closely follows the original setting and plot. In 19th-century England, Henry Dashwood’s death hands his Sussex estate to his son, leaving his widow (Caitríona Balfe) and three daughters nearly penniless in a cramped Devon cottage. Composed Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) quietly loves the diffident Edward Ferrars (George MacKay); impulsive Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) is torn between dashing Willoughby (Frank Dillane) and the grave Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum); the warm-hearted Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) watches over them all.This is at least the tenth time the novel has been adapted for the screen. My three favorites are “From Prada to Nada” (2011), set in present-day Los Angeles, “Kandukondain Kandukondain” (“I Have Found It”) from 2000, a riotously jolly Tamil romantic musical with an A. R. Rahman score; and the faithful 1995 version, adapted by Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee.Now it falls to the English director Georgia Oakley and the Australian screenwriter Diana Reid, to breathe new life into this canonical rom-com. Ms. Oakley’s previous feature, “Blue Jean” (2022), followed a closeted lesbian PE teacher in Thatcher-era Newcastle. As in that film, she explores how women’s inner lives must stay hidden under social constraint, and how a lack of money — and patriarchal rules like primogeniture — breed misery. “Wealth has nothing to do with happiness,” Marianne declares, unconvincingly.Ms. Oakley had plenty of toys to play with: A stellar cast, a juicy budget from Focus Features and Working Title, gorgeous locations including Dartmoor and Knebworth House, and the Italian production designer Francesca Di Mottola, who crafted the look of Hulu’s gloriously imaginative “The Great.” Yet the film looks drab and drained of color from its first frame. Compare Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026), whose designer, Suzie Davies, papered Cathy’s bedroom with photographs of Margot Robbie’s own skin, veins and all, and made the walls sweat when Cathy fell ill. Ms. Di Mottola and the cinematographer Arnaud Potier give us drawing rooms as lifeless as a National Trust tea shop, and a countryside painted in a palette of porridge, mist, and wet sheep.Even more bloodless are Grace Snell’s muted, earthy costumes, which leave the young women without a hint of bust or curve, odd for an era whose stays were designed to lift and display. Ms. Oakley has said that pristine costumes and hair keep audiences “at arm’s length from the characters.” Ironically, her dreary vision keeps us further away still.Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles in ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ Focus Features Ms. Oakley’s direction of the actors makes it worse. Austen’s prose, lifted straight from the page, often sounds stilted. Ang Lee’s 1995 cast offers a useful benchmark. As Elinor, the luminously lovely Ms. Edgar-Jones faces off against Emma Thompson, who at 35 was far older than Austen’s 19-year-old heroine, yet earned an Oscar nomination for her performance, as well as a statuette for her screenplay and, eventually, a husband: Greg Wise, her Willoughby. Ms. Edgar-Jones, 27 during shooting, is closer to Elinor’s age but further from her character. She is supposed to be the “sense” of the story, yet brings no gravitas. Worse, she often seems indifferent, when she should be a pressure cooker of suppressed desire.As Marianne, Ms. Creed-Miles (best known for Amazon’s “Hanna”) is up against Kate Winslet, a little-known 19-year-old in 1995, with “Titanic” on a distant horizon. Marianne is the “sensibility” of the title, and should be fire incarnate. Winslet blazed: sobbing into her pillow, staggering through the rain reciting a Shakespeare sonnet, in a performance that won her an Oscar nomination and stole the film from under Ms. Thompson’s nose. Ms. Creed-Miles smolders without ever catching light, her Marianne more sulky teenager than romantic firebrand.The 2026 gentlemen fare no better. Edward Ferrars is supposed to be, like Mr. Darcy, the ultimate panty-melter, and Hugh Grant pulled it off with irresistible, bumbling charm. George MacKay, so strong in “1917,” is wooden here, and his kissability isn’t helped by close-ups of grey, crooked lower teeth.As Colonel Brandon, Alan Rickman set a stratospheric standard, all brooding menace on the surface and wounded tenderness beneath. Herbert Nordrum, the charming barista of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” makes his first major English-language outing a muffled one, his diction so mushy that whole lines go missing.Fiona Shaw’s Mrs. Jennings is the one rainbow in this thespian puddle of gasoline. A veteran of “Killing Eve,” Aunt Petunia in “Harry Potter,” and a 1995 “Persuasion,” she brings pedigree, a magnificently heaving bosom — the only one in the film — and the only accent to escape the monotonous Queen’s English dictated by Ms. Oakley.So how does this film fare as a rom-com? On the “com” side, Austen’s wit is the heart of her genius, and Ms. Oakley bombs on this count, largely because her actors break the first rule of comedy — don’t laugh at your own jokes. Austen can still make us roll in the aisles, as demonstrated by “Jane Austen’s Period Drama” (2024), a 13-minute satirical homage by Julia Aks and Steve Pinder in which Miss Estrogenia Talbot starts menstruating midway through a marriage proposal.As for the “rom,” only one scene made my heart flutter: Marianne and Willoughby singing an 18th-century folk song at the piano. Otherwise, the stakes are low. By the end of the first act it is clear who will end up with whom, and one question nags: Why on earth would these women fall for these men?Eros is as absent as Cupid. Austen has inspired plenty of desire in her fans — witness Lissa Trevor’s “Spank Me, Mr. Darcy” (2013), a mini-masterpiece of BDSM-flavored erotica – but anyone hoping for bodice-ripping here will be sorely disappointed. There’s no flesh on display, male or female, and only one kiss that could remotely be classified as French.‘Sense and Sensibility.’ Sebastian DoggartThis unsexing is curious, since Ms. Oakley has spoken openly about being an “out queer woman,” noted that people kept telling her this was “Jane Austen’s most queer novel,” and has cited scholarship reading Marianne as “this kind of early queer character.” None of that finds its way onto the screen: there is not a hint of sapphic tension between the sisters. The result is not just bloodless but heteronormative.“Torment after torment!” Marianne laments near the film’s welcome end. And I haven’t even mentioned the unconvincing CGI of 18th-century London; Roger Goula’s treacly score, its strings swooning like a Victorian heroine reaching for the smelling salts, press-ganging us into passions the screen never supplies; or the clumsy sound design, which isolates one hushed conversation while another character sits squarely in shot, supposedly out of earshot.Unromantic, unsexy, unoriginal, unfunny. After 132 minutes, I was yearning for Mr. Bennet to appear and declare: “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough.”

A Senseless Austen Adaptation

A Senseless Austen Adaptation

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