This month Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching movie adaptations of Jane Austen books.

First up is Sense and Sensibility.

Sense and Sensibility was the first Jane Austen movie adaptation I ever watched. I started it, thinking I’d hate it but ended up falling in love with it.

I’ve now watched it three or four times.

I’ve decided to “live blog” this one as I watch it, similar to how I wrote about Persuasion and again I will not provide spoilers in case you’ve never seen the movie or read the book.

Erin joked that last week’s post was like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 post and I liked that comparison so consider this a blog version of Myster Science Theater or Rifftrax.

Before I start I will relay a couple paragraphs from Wikipedia about the basic plot of the book and film:

“It tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor (age 19) and Marianne (age 16½) as they come of age. They have an older half-brother, John, and a younger sister, Margaret (age 13).

The novel follows the three Dashwood sisters and their widowed mother as they are forced to leave the family estate at Norland Park and move to Barton Cottage, a modest home on the property of distant relative Sir John Middleton. There Elinor and Marianne experience love, romance, and heartbreak. The novel is set probably between 1792 and 1797 in Sussex, West England.”

So the movie opens with a man dying and he wants his second family taken care of and asks his son, John, to take care of his second wife and three daughters.

We know right away that the promise the son makes to his father on his father’s deathbed will not be kept because he already looks swarmy.

Op, yep. Swarmy to the core and his wife is even worse. She has the most evil ideas and a very pinched face. It’s no surprise her name is Fanny.

As we get to the young ladies who have been left behind, Marianne is playing a very sad song on the piano and we will be introduced to the humor injected into the film by Emma Thompson and her perfectly timed sarcasm and whit.

She asks Marianne to play something different because the music is making their mother weep even more over the death of their father.

Marianne tries a different song but it’s even more depressing than the first.

“I meant something less mournful, dearest,” Emma’s character (Elinor) quips from the other room.

It’s so funny to watch a family mourning yet feeling a bit like you want to giggle over the behavior of Marianne and the over dramatic mother who is flustered because they are being kicked out of their home by the cold and heartless half-brother and his wife.

It was an awful time, though – where men inherited everything and daughters were kicked out of their homes. These women will go from wealth to poverty very quickly which will be a shock to them but in some ways, I think they will be better off poor, without the stuck up rules of the rich back then.

Oh. Hugh Grant in his prime. Hello. Playing Edward Ferrars, Fanny’s brother.

Good grief those high collars look ridiculous, though.

He’s so polite. Unlike his sister. Odd how they were both raised in the same family and he is so much nicer.

And he and Elinor – well, I promised no spoilers but, well, the fact they get along so well is certainly making Edward’s evil sister very, very upset. It’s making Elinor’s mother hopeful because she’d love to get her house back again or at least a very nice house.

Honestly, they’re both a bit conniving. The whole idea back then that men could only marry those who were in their “class” is so disgusting and annoying. I love that Jane knew that and instead writes about marrying for love and not prestige.

Barton Cottage. Sigh. It’s so cute. So much nicer than those big, drafty mansions. Well, then again, they are shivering and grabbing extra blankets in the cottage to show how drafty it was as well.

Sir John offers the women the cottage. He is Mrs. Dashwood’s eccentric cousin with an even more eccentric wife.Yes, Sir JohnOr as I remember him – Siegfried Farnon from the original All Creatures Great and Small show from the 1980s or 70s. Whichever. I used to watch it on PBS with my mom.

Or as I remember him – Siegfried Farnon from the original All Creatures Great and Small show from the 1980s or 70s. Whichever. I used to watch it on PBS with my mom.

Ah. Colonel Brandon. Strangely attractive even though I’ve never had a thing for Alan Rickman.

Not sure how I feel about him looking at Kate Winslet. He’s probably old enough in real life to be her father. He’s probably supposed to be younger in the movie. Or not. Who knows. It was a different time.

The cinematography and scenery in this movie is so beautiful – like most of the Jane Austen movies. Sweeping landscapes and towering Victorian mansions, beautiful dresses, handsome men and women.

Enter another handsome character – John Willoughby. Alas, he might not be as dashing as we think. We will have to watch and see.

Hugh Laurie. I totally forgot he was in this. He’s the guy who played House and the man who my son says is weird to hear with an English accent and that he thinks that Hugh’s English accent is actually fake.

I can’t figure this Willoughby out. He seems so delightful and interested and invested in the family, not just Marianne, but … there’s something just not right. He wants Marianne and her family yet – I won’t say. You’ll have to watch the movie.

Again, though, the rules of class and who you could and could not date back then were just ridiculous.

Poor Elinor. She is the only stable one in the whole family it seems. Holding it all together.

Everyone around her seems completely crazy.

Lucy Steele. She breezes in and just adds to the crazy. You’ll see. Completely delusional.

I pretty much want to throttle Marianne through this entire movie.

Robert Ferrars. Eek. That is all.

Were people really this uptight in the 1700s or just the British? I know they weren’t always uptight but these period dramas just make them so…proper. I’m drawn to the characters who aren’t very proper in these movies.

Elinor seems proper in some ways, but real in others.

There are a lot of confusing twists and turns in this one.

A couple people need a good slap across the face.

One needs a right shake and wake up call, but she’s young so I’ll try to cut her some slack. Plus, there are a couple of scenes where my heart just melts for poor Marianne. She had such high hopes and fell so hard only to be rejected in such a public way.

An aside – get Colonel Brandon some blasted blankets too! He’s an old man! He could catch his death. My goodness.

Alan Rickman was such a good actor too. At one point when Marianne finally notices him – his expression from hesitant to touching. Sigh. Just swoon-worthy.

I won’t spoil the ending so I will wander off here for a bit to discuss the history of the book and some behind-the-scenes of the making of the movie.

The book was published in 1811 and was Austen’s first novel. It was not published under her name but instead, the title page simply read: written by “a lady.”

It was published in three volumes to begin with and the cost to publish them cost more than a third of Austen’s annual household income. She paid for the books to be published and barely made a profit off them. She made $178 on the 750 publications sold, which would be about $6,358 today. As a self-published author myself, I certainly feel her pain and relate/

I did not know until this week that the screenplay for the movie was written by Emma Thompson and she won an Oscar and Golden Globe for it. She was 35 at the time the film was made.

According to Wikipedia, Thompson spent five years between other projects working on the screenplay. Thompson had never written a screenplay before so many studios were not interested in taking on the project. Showing a bit of a novice writer she was, she almost lost the entire project in a computer failure.

From Wikipedia, “As Thompson mentioned on the BBC program QI in 2009, at one point in the writing process a computer failure almost lost the entire work. In panic Thompson called fellow actor and close friend Stephen Fry, the host of QI and a self-professed “geek”. After seven hours, Fry was able to recover the documents from the device while Thompson had tea with Hugh Laurie who was at Fry’s house at the time.”

The film was directed by Ang Lee, a Taiwanese director and Lindsay Doran, the producer, chose him because of his past films about complex families. He was not familiar with Jane Austen at all.

In an interview, Lee said, “I thought they were crazy: I was brought up in Taiwan, what do I know about 19th-century England? About halfway through the script, it started to make sense why they chose me. In my films, I’ve been trying to mix social satire and family drama. I realized that all along I had been trying to do Jane Austen without knowing it. Jane Austen was my destiny. I just had to overcome the cultural barrier.”

In case anyone is wondering about Thompson’s age compared to how old Elinor was supposed to be, that was a concern brought up by Thompson herself. For one, she wanted Natasha Richardson and her sister Joely to be cast as the sisters, not herself, but Lee and the studio wanted Thompson because she was becoming well known as an actress.

Thompson finally agreed but they increased Elinor’s age to 27 instead of 19 to make the idea she was a spinster more believable to modern audiences.

I think the very ending is very fitting and serves a certain person right. If you’ve seen it let me know what you think in the comments.

In case you are interested, here is Emma accepting her Golden Globe for the film.

And here you can watch the making of the film:

If you have YouTube Prime you can also watch the full movie here:

If you want to read Erin’s impression of the movie, you can read her post on her blog.

Up next week we will be watching the 2005 edition of Pride & Prejudice.

Have you seen this version of Sense and Sensibility? What did you think of it?