★★½ (2½ out of 4)
There’s no improving on perfection, so this new adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel of grace under the pressure of gender inequality must fight an uphill battle. And by that I mean Ang Lee’s 1995 “Sense and Sensibility” with an Oscar-winning script by Emma Thompson that three decades later has aged like a vintage wine. Doubters can stream it for themselves. You’ll be all the better for it.
This is no knock on the edgier intentions of director Georgia Oakley, whose 2022 debut film, “Blue Jean,” was a queer love story transpiring in the Thatcher era that wore its politics on its sleeve. Austen would faint dead way in the face of such blunt force trauma. Oakley is aware. She knows that “Sense and Sensibility,” set centuries apart from the here and now, calls for a restrained sexuality. So does screenwriter Diana Reid, whose sibling books—one about two sisters in love with the same woman—prepared her to look for ways to express emotions that go unspoken in Austen’s novel.
Oakley’s take on Austen is also distinctly less generous with mirth and malice. She does let us feel the pang of poverty inflicting the Dashwood sisters—Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) and young Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). Their widowed mother (a casually misused Caitriona Balfe) sees marriage as the only out since the family estate has passed to the girls’ half-brother John Dashwood (a properly wussified Tom Brooke) and his monster wife Fanny (Stacy Martin, doing bitchy to a turn). In a quick minute, the Dashwood ladies are sheltering in a shabby Devonshire cottage at the good graces of wealthy Mrs. Jennings (a dithering Fiona Shaw) with few prospects in sight.
A good cry is beyond the creators of this Jane Austen redo, as is the attending swirl of humor and heart.
All credit to Oakley and Reid for showing what awaited women alone with limited means two centuries ago. But their reduced circumstances cast a pall over the film from which it never fully recovers. Edgar-Jones finds the rationality that makes her Elinor the “sense” of the title in contrast to roiling emotions that mark the “sensibility” of Marianne, allowing the dynamite Creed-Miles to express the more free-flowing feelings that Elinor regularly stifles.
It’s impossible not to compare their performances to what Thompson and then newcomer Kate Winslet, 19, accomplished respectively as Elinor and Marianne. Oakley and Reid also have little truck with the idea of gentlemen coming to the rescue. The excellent Frank Dillane brings roguish sex appeal to John Willoughby, Marianne’s suitor, until a richer target comes along. George MacKay infuses truly decent underpinnings into Elinor’s swain, Edward Ferrars. Hugh Grant played Ferrars in the 1995 version and MacKay, try as he might, lacks the boyish, floppy-haired aura of adorable that defined the “Four Weddings” star for decades. Even when Ferrars dumps Elinor, it’s for a promise this man of his word previously made to another woman. These distinctions count in Austen, if no longer to the world.
Clearly, comparisons do no favors for this 21st century take on “Sense and Sensibility.” Most damaged is Norwegian actor Herbert Nordrum, who has the unenviable task of following the late, great Alan Rickman in the role of Colonel Brandon, the older man who offers Marianne his heart when hers has been vandalized. Rickman’s portrait of romantic longing is unmatched in romancinerma.
How can “Sense and Sensibility” 2026 hope to keep up? It can’t. Ang Lee and Thompson knew that Austen, in her quietly devastating way, was out to break all our hearts. And did. Oakley and Reid certainly do a respectable job capturing Austen’s reserve and protofeminism. But a good cry is beyond them, as is the attending swirl of humor and heart. I know which version is going on my must-watch list.