The first loss in Sense and Sensibility is an address. When the Dashwoods have to leave Norland, Elinor and Marianne lose the place where their dispositions might have seemed like private family characteristics. From then on, Elinor’s ability to keep a conversation pleasant and Marianne’s refusal to hide an attachment have different public costs. Georgia Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid build their adaptation around that difference. The romances matter, but the strongest claim the film makes on Austen is that the sisters spend the book learning how much they have asked one another to endure.
Daisy Edgar-Jones has an especially delicate job as Elinor. Much of the character’s work lies in making a small social exchange pass without disaster. An actor can disappear inside the success of that work. Edgar-Jones makes its effort visible in the time between receiving a piece of information and offering an answer acceptable to the room. Those pauses leave enough room to register the unpleasant possibility that another person may be enjoying her difficulty. Elinor’s good manners have a practical use. The longer she has to employ them, the more clearly we can see the exhaustion underneath.
Esmé Creed-Miles gives Marianne a kind of intelligence that makes the contrast with her sister more productive. She can see a room’s hypocrisies and still make a poor judgment about who will protect her once she has defied them. That combination gives Frank Dillane’s Willoughby room to be attractive. He seems to offer the possibility of finding somebody with whom the terms of a conversation could be different. It matters that the attraction has a social content for Marianne. She wants a partner who will recognize the person she is when she forgets to consider the furniture, the witnesses and the weather.
The men fare best when they make the sisters’ forms of attention available for observation. George MacKay’s Edward Ferrars has a reserve that Elinor can respect because she knows how easily people mistake reserve for a failure to feel. There is genuine risk in discovering something to admire about a person whose reasons for behaving that way are still largely unknown. Willoughby provides Marianne with a contrary pleasure. She can hear herself addressed in a tone she has been hoping to hear. The film can cut between the two attractions and give both of them the force of an observation that may turn out to be incomplete.
Oakley has a good feeling for the difference between being outside and being free. The landscape gives Marianne space to move, but it also brings weather and exposure with it. In company, the Dashwoods are repeatedly confronted with how much of life is arranged by people who can afford to treat their own preferences as custom. That imbalance is easy to lose in the visual comfort of a period production. The handsome houses are more interesting when they can be felt as somebody else’s property. Elinor can enjoy a room’s warmth and still be working out what being welcome in it obliges her to say.
The images carry some of that uncertainty. Cinematographer Arnaud Potier’s palette allows the rooms and countryside to share a range of weathered, muted color. It makes the people’s different responses to a place visible without requiring the environment to change around them. A house can be grand and still give two people remarkably little privacy. An open field can give Marianne an apparent freedom that stops at the point where somebody else starts interpreting her behavior. Oakley’s adaptation gains bite every time that separation between looking free and being free has an immediate consequence in the picture.
A good Austen adaptation has to decide how much space to leave between the discomfort of a social encounter and the audience’s enjoyment of it. Here the movement toward sisterly intimacy gives some encounters a softer landing than they might have in the novel. There is pleasure in letting the sisters come into clearer focus as a pair. It is possible, though, to miss the moments when a secondary character is funny because they have the power to be obtuse. A little more time with that sort of foolishness would sharpen the pressures Oakley is good at observing.
The third Dashwood sister, Margaret, offers a useful way of reading the older pair. There is a girl in the household learning which subjects cause a conversation to stop, and watching two women offer different accounts of why the rule is worth keeping. The film’s investment in the sisters as a unit allows that education to feel more consequential than a child’s comic interruption. Elinor and Marianne’s choices are helping to make a world Margaret will soon have to enter. That perspective adds some welcome unease to the comfort of recognizing an old story.
The film benefits from treating restraint as a behavior with a history. Elinor has reasons to value it. Marianne has reasons to resent the work of making everybody else comfortable. A story that assigned them opposing moral positions would have much less to offer than the exchanges here, in which each woman becomes an imperfect witness to the other’s situation. When the adaptation is at its surest, the romance plot matters because of the life a sister will have to live after the attention has moved elsewhere.
