The story focuses specifically on the rich inner lives and opposing temperaments of its two sister-heroines, the rational Elinor and the romantic Marianne. It is, after all, a novel about what happens to a family of four women (a recently widowed mother and her three daughters) forced make their way in the world, suddenly without means or even a home. He argued that the “chief problem of the book is the stupefying dullness of the men the Dashwood sisters eventually pair off with”-a problem, Menand noted, that Thompson appeared to have fixed.Īusten’s Sense and Sensibility invests far more energy into developing its female characters than its male ones-and understandably so.
Louis Menand, writing in The New York Review of Books in February 1996, called the film’s changes “improvements on Austen’s original,” noting the heresy of that point of view. This required Thompson’s screenplay to make several departures from Austen’s 1811 novel, as I discussed in an essay I wrote for the 1998 book, Jane Austen in Hollywood.
Sense and Sensibility set out to do something different: It made male receptiveness to female needs and desires and a commitment to proto-gender equality seem both incredibly attractive and historically inevitable. The critic William Luhr has summed up the film as offering viewers a “conservative if not reactionary masculinity,” and an excessively violent reaction to a moment when traditional manhood itself was imagined as under attack.
(Gibson, who also starred, walked away that year with the Best Director Oscar for the film.) Braveheart has not stood the test of time, having once been declared the worst movie ever to win best picture: Gibson’s William Wallace, loosely based on the historical 13th-century Scottish warrior, now looks like a chest-thumping cross between Thor, Fabio, and Rambo. To see what Sense and Sensibility was up against, it’s useful to remember that the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1996 was Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. In other words, Sense and Sensibility used updated versions of early 19th-century heroes to sell emerging ideals of manhood to the late-20th century, at a time when the pro-feminist men’s movement was challenging gender norms in the realm of politics and pop culture. Sense and Sensibility deliberately imbued Austen’s first published heroes with qualities they either didn’t have in the novel or didn’t have to the same degree: egalitarian attitudes toward women, an affection for children, and emotional sensitivity. Less remembered is the radical way the film elevated its two male characters-Colonel Brandon (played by the late Alan Rickman) and Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant)-beyond their source material. 20 years ago, is best known for its dazzling direction and for Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay. When Meth Was an Antidepressant Olga KhazanĪng Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, which premiered in the U.K.
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