Georgia Oakley's new adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, written by Diana Reid and centered on Elinor and Marianne Dashwood after the loss of their fortune and family home.
Any new Sense and Sensibility has to share the room with Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's 1995 film. Georgia Oakley is not pretending otherwise. Her version finds its distinction by moving away from the simplest reading of one sensible sister and one emotional sister, instead treating Elinor and Marianne as two young women whose survival depends on learning from each other.
Sense and Sensibility has no shortage of romantic complications, eligible men and financial consequences attached to marriage. Georgia Oakley's new adaptation is nevertheless putting a different relationship first. Following its London premiere, the film is presenting Elinor and Marianne less as competing philosophies and more as sisters whose contrasting instincts gradually reshape each other.
This new adaptation earns its existence whenever it stops looking back at 1995 and allows Georgia Oakley to impose her own texture: natural light, 35mm film, rough countryside and characters whose emotions seem to contaminate the landscape around them. Daisy Edgar-Jones excels at Elinor's restraint while Esmé Creed-Miles gives Marianne an almost feral energy. Fiona Shaw recovers much of the humor that a more melancholic direction occasionally leaves behind. Not everything lands with equal force: London suddenly feels more conventional, some of the romantic leads lack presence, and the prevailing solemnity can soften Austen's delicious social cruelty. But Oakley creates enough striking images and finds enough truth in the bond between the sisters to make this considerably more than a heritage remake.
