What, did you think I was only going to write one post about Sense and Sensibility? Preposterous!
The 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was meaningful for me in several ways. It was my first introduction to Jane Austen, and if you haven’t noticed, I kinda like her a little bit. It was also the film that cemented my love for Emma Thompson, and if you haven’t noticed, I kinda like her a little bit, too. Finally, it was the film that introduced me to another one of my favorite actresses, the lovely and luminous Kate Winslet.
In this movie, Kate Winslet plays Marianne Dashwood, the polar opposite to her practical sister Elinor. Marianne favors deep emotion and sensibility over exercising good sense (hence the title). She scoffs at social rules and prefers to follow her heart above anything else. She throws caution to the wind and openly embraces the man she loves (or at least what passes for an embrace during the Regency period), and is humiliated to discover that he has found another person to marry:
Poor Marianne. She’s fallen too hard, too fast, and made a bit of an ass of herself – not that I can relate to that feeling at all (*cough.*) I will be completely honest here: at different times during my life when I have felt overwhelmed with emotion, I sometimes tell myself, “Stop being a Marianne! Be an Elinor! Calm down!”
Yet Marianne is more of my default emotional state, one who feels deeply and can’t always hide it. When I first saw those large, wounded eyes on Kate Winslet’s face fill with tears of shock and betrayal, I fell in platonic love. Her Marianne spoke to me and I wanted to climb into the screen and give her a hug.
I’ve followed Kate Winslet’s career pretty closely over the years. Of the thirteen performances I’ve seen, I think Little Children is probably her best work because it’s the most subtle and nuanced. But I’m talking about formative performances this month, not All-Time Best Performances, and Sense and Sensibility is the movie that made me start following her work. And yes, I will absolutely be going to see Titanic in 3-D next month.
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I agree – great performance. This movie also introduced me to Jane Austen – and I also like her quite a bit.
Funny thing. When I read your first post on Emma Thompson, I thought “Yeah, I love that performance, but how about Sense ans Sensibility?”The next day, you wrote about her in “Sense and Sensibility” and I thought: “Yeah, but how about Kate Winslet?” 😀
Sense and Sensibility is great too, but how about Howards End? Thompson arguably deliver her best performance as Margaret (Impressive scene when she finds out about Henry’s affair with Jackie).
I haven’t seen it.