Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Directed by Ang Lee
The Dashwood sisters, sensible Elinor and passionate Marianne, learn that their prospects of marriage seem doomed by their family's sudden loss of fortune. After Henry Dashwood dies unexpectedly, his estate must pass on by law to his son. These circumstances leave Mr. Dashwood's wife and daughters without a home and with barely enough money to live on. As Elinor and Marianne struggle to find romantic fulfillment in a society obsessed with financial and social status, they must learn to mix sense with sensibility in their dealings with both money and men.
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3 films that influenced Sense and Sensibility
What critics say influenced Sense and Sensibility
The most recent high, in the English-speaking world, covered most of the 1990s, when the successes of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and Merchant-Ivory's Howards End in 1992 (itself a delayed capitalisation on the same team's A Room with a View , released in 1986) proved enough to trigger a mania for well-heeled adaptations and variations of the things you read in high school, or a least in a freshman year college English class.
If you won't listen to Siskel, the Academy or the National Society of Film Critics, listen to me -- the guy who gave Peter Jackson's gorefest Braindead (aka Dead Alive) four stars and refuses on principle ever to see another Merchant Ivory film.
Lee's American hits The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman dealt with love complicated by familial disapproval, repressed emotion and clashes of priorities, exactly the stuff of which Sense and Sensibility is made.
"Sense and Sensibility" has been directed by Ang Lee ("The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman"), who is from Taiwan, and whose choice for this assignment has been questioned.
It is both her first script and the first non-Chinese project for Taiwanese director Ang Lee, whose films "Pushing Hands," "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," like Austen's novels, expose the comic nuances of love and family life.
Director Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet) is a fine storyteller, but he falls back on a few too many mannered compositions.
Like the two that came before it, "Sense and Sensibility," directed by Ang Lee ("The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman") and starring Emma Thompson, who also wrote the script, is proof to any doubters of the resilience and continuing emotional power of an author who began writing 200 years ago.