★★★★★ - DAILY TELEGRAPH
- Director Georgia Oakley gives us landscape cinema with fresh, tender, intuitive performances from Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles -
Perhaps every generation – if it’s lucky, at least – gets the Jane Austen adaptation it needs. Three decades on from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s sunny and ravishing Cool Britannia-era take on Sense and Sensibility comes this wild and plangently beautiful successor, astutely adapted and exquisitely directed by Blue Jean’s Georgia Oakley.
For our squally times, its windblown, rain-tangled soul is a perfect fit. Indeed, in spirit Oakley’s film-making often feels more Brontë than Austen, which is especially nice in a year in which an actual Brontë film, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, more closely resembled a Meat Loaf video (in a good way). Oakley has her two elder Dashwood sisters, Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles’s Marianne, clomp around rural Sussex and Devon like wild ponies as their romantic fortunes are buffeted one way and another.
This is real landscape cinema, organic and pesticide free – though the particular landscape in which it unfolds is a double one. Of course we are in Austen’s Regency England with its strict social codes, but somewhere more ancient and green can always be glimpsed underneath. Laundry is pegged out in the crumbling remnants of old farm buildings; the branch of a venerable tree is hung with a swing. Every family seat and echoing ballroom feels strangely eternal, while their current inhabitants – however intensely felt their fears, desires and matrimonial aspirations may be – are but fleeting guests.
The young men, as you know, are a taciturn bunch. George MacKay makes a pensive, charming Edward Ferrars; Frank Dillane a rakish, almost imperceptibly creepy John Willoughby; Herbert Nordrum a tense, frowning (and, like Alan Rickman in the Lee version, magnetically un-hunky) Colonel Brandon.
But Oakley allows her second-tier players to go big, with entertaining results: I loved Turlough Convery’s Hagrid-like Sir John Middleton, who charitably puts up the newly homeless Dashwoods in a cottage on his estate. And I flat-out adored Fiona Shaw’s uproarious take on Mrs Jennings, a genial meddler with a laugh like a blocked sink and a cleavage to shame Sydney Sweeney’s. Underpinning it all is the sisterly bond between Elinor and Marianne, expressed by Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles on a level so intuitive and tender it seems almost subliminal.
The performances have historically appropriate poise, but also feel fresh and unrehearsed. Oakley intensifies the naturalism with the inspired decision to regularly inject scenes with dogs, which sniff and potter around as the drama unfolds, or simply doze at the feet of their master or mistress. That might sound trivial, but the effect is humanising and often warmly comic, too.
This is Austen with the bonnets blown off – and all the better for it.
- Robbie Collin, DAILY TELEGRAPH
Sense and Sensibility is now playing at Light House Cinema!