Sense and Sensibility (2008)

February 5, 2015 | Paul Wake Baker

This 2008 adaptation of Jane Austen’s first published novel stands out as the best so far, not because it is utterly faithful to the novel, although it is the most faithful of all adaptations over the last twenty-five years, but because it really penetrates the emotional heart of the novel.

This version begins by revealing the two actions that fuel the story. The first is only alluded to in the novel: the seduction of Eliza Williams by John Willoughby (Dominic Cooper). It is shown in close-ups lit with the bright red of a fireplace, so it isn’t possible to truly identify either the seducer or seduced. The second action is the true beginning of the novel: the death of Mr. Henry Dashwood. On his deathbed, surrounded by his second wife, Mrs. Dashwood (Janet McTeer), and her daughters, Elinor (Hattie Morahan), Marianne (Charity Wakefield), and Margaret (Lucy Boynton), he entreats his son John (Mark Gatiss), from his first marriage, to make sure they are adequately taken care of, given that the English system of inheritance will exclude them from all but a paltry yearly stipend.

John inherits Norland Park and his wife, Fanny (Claire Skinner), immediately wants to move in and convinces him that his promise to his father certainly wouldn’t any kind of financial security. When the Dashwoods arrive, Marianne is quite upset. She feels the mansion should be rightfully theirs, but Elinor, the more sensible of the two reminds her that the house is not legally theirs. Fanny is unbearable. They decide to look for a new place to live, but Mrs. Dashwood simply has no idea of how little money they have. Elinor suggests that they will only be able to afford a cottage.

Fanny’s brother, Edward Ferrars (Dan Stevens), the oldest son in their moneyed family, comes to visit and he and Elinor are deeply attracted to one another. Just the opposite of Fanny, he is nice to Margaret and makes friends with Marianne. Fanny, seeing the attachment between Elinor and Edward, counsels Mrs. Dashwood that Edward is destined to marry a very wealthy, well-placed society woman. Shortly after that, Mrs. Dashwood receives an invitation from her cousin, Sir John Middleton (Mark Williams), to let a cottage on his estate at Barton Park in Devonshire and she immediately accepts.

The family relocates to a beautiful cottage by the seaside, surrounded by rolling hills and the rough rocky cliffs of the shoreline. Sir John and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Jennings (Linda Bassett), immediately set about trying to find husbands for them. They introduce Colonel Brandon (David Morrissey), a wealthy former military man of thirty-five. He falls in love with Marianne, but she thinks he is too old and lacks passion. In an attempt to evade him, she takes a fall in the hills and is rescued by Willoughby, who is visiting his aunt at nearby Allenham. Thinking him very romantic, Marianne falls in love with him, not realizing that he has already seduced Eliza Williams. Brandon, confronts Willoughby, but the latter proclaims that his intentions toward Marianne are honorable.

Mrs. Jennings’ nieces, Lucy (Anna Madeley) and Anne Steele (Daisy Haggard), come to visit and Lucy confides in Elinor that she has had a private four-year engagement to Edward. It comes as a shock, but Lucy swears Elinor to secrecy. Every time they meet thereafter, Lucy reminds Elinor that’s Edward is her lover.

As the whole group prepares to go on a picnic to Brandon’s estate, Delaford, but receives an urgent letter that causes him to cancel. He rides off leaving the party confuses, but Willoughby takes advantage of the situation to take Marianne to show her Allenham, while his aunt is away. Since he has taken a lock of her hair and seems to be completely in love with Marianne, Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor assume that they are privately engaged, but when it looks like Willoughby will make a formal proposal, he suddenly leaves for London at his aunt’s bidding.

Later, Mrs. Jennings decides to visit her home in London and takes the girls with her. Expecting to see Willoughby, Marianne writes to him every day, but hears nothing. Then, at an Assembly, she confronts him and he coldly turns his back on her. Nearly fainting, she is rescued by Brandon. He returns all of her letters to her, apologizing for giving the false impression that he may have cared for her. Marianne is distraught. Mrs. Jennings then discovers that Willoughby is engaged to a young woman of great fortune and Brandon reveals to Elinor that Willoughby seduced his young ward, fifteen year old Eliza Williams and left her with child.

The group goes to a gathering held by Fanny’s mother, Mrs. Ferrars (Jean Marsh), where Lucy Steele hopes to gain the good will of her future mother-in-law, but when Anne accidentally reveals the engagement, Mrs. Ferrars tells Edward that unless he breaks the engagement, she will cut him off from his fortune. A man of honor, Edward sticks to his promise to Lucy.

Brandon escorts the family back to Devonshire, stopping at Delaford along the way. Seized by her grief at losing Willoughby, Marianne gets lost in the rain and is found by Brandon. She is put to bed, but develops a life-threatening fever. Elinor waits at her bedside while Brandon brings their mother, but Marianne’s fever breaks and she recovers. Realizing that Brandon loves her and seeing how he has cared for her, Marianne switches her affections to him and becomes engaged.

When Edward returns, everyone assumes that he is married to Lucy, but he reveals that Lucy has also switched her affections to his brother and has married him, leaving Edward free to marry Elinor. Hearing this news, Elinor tries to cope with her feelings as Edward proposes. A happy ending is thus concluded, with Marianne happy as the mistress of Delaford while Elinor marries poor Edward in his country parsonage, happier than she would have ever believed.

Fans of the book will note that several changes have been made, but nothing truly drastic. Many other versions of the story have managed to lose characters, such as little sister Margaret, who plays a great part in this version, and Anne Steele, who also plays a big part. The script is written by Andrew Davies who did such a masterful job with the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which is largely regarded as the best version of that masterpiece. Even with the few changes that Davies has made, the script remains more faithful to the novel than any other version. The characters of Elinor and Marianne are beautifully written and take their part at the heart of the story. Marianne’s passion is appropriately tempered with Elinor’s restraint.

Casting is frequently the cause of either the success or failure of a novel adaptation and that is certainly the case here. Hatty Morahan’s Elinor is staid, but always, beneath the surface, you see her emotions whirling. This care to show us how much Elinor feels, while outwardly appearing in control, is simply a beautiful job of acting. Charity Wakefield’s beauty certainly compliments her passionate view of life and the acting is superb. These two bring us full circle as Marianne learns some of the restraint of her sister, while Elinor finally opens up her heart and allows us to see deeply inside. The chemistry of these two as sisters is truly great. Janet McTeer is marvelous as Mrs. Dashwood and the charming restraint of Lucy Boynton as Margaret is simply delightful.

All the technical aspects are very well done, the sets beautiful and especially landscape of Devonshire is a delight to the eye. One great little detail is Margaret’s collection of sea shells which she strings together to make a visual motif that the camera repeatedly comes back to. The beauty of the sea side is lovingly captured.

Sequenced into a three episode series, each episode lasting one hour, it comes out to three hours compared to the five hours of Pride and Prejudice, but compared other movie versions, constrained to a two-hour format, this covers the scope of the book very well indeed. If watching the DVD, you may as well skip the self-congratulatory “Making of” featurette and go immediately to Disk 2, which has a movie length BBC production called “Miss Austen Regrets.” This is a fictional biography of Jane Austen and is fairly well done.

I highly recommend this version of Sense and Sensibility and it would make a great addition to any Janite collection.

Wallander

December 15, 2014 | Paul Wake Baker

This BBC mystery series is actually a chain of films based on the novels by Swedish writer Henning Mankell featuring Ystad police detective Kurt Wallander, a middle aged man coping with the deterioration of Sweden’s utopian ideals as the country wades into the 21st Century. The Wallander novels have attained a world-wide popularity based as much on the character’s accessibility as the gripping nature of the crimes he solves.

Although many of the novels had already been adapted into Swedish films, in 2006 Mankell formed a production company called Yellow Bird for the express purpose of bringing the novels to the English speaking part of the world. Producers Anne Mensah of BBC Scotland and Andy Harries and Francis Hopkinson of Left Bank Pictures were brought in to shepherd the project. Although many distinguished British actors were considered for the series, Kenneth Branagh was a fan of the books and directly interceded the process. He met with Mankell at an Ingmar Bergman film festival and literally talked the author into hiring him to play the role. Various locations were considered for the movie including Scotland and the state of Maine in the United States, but the importance of the country the books were set in, Sweden, ultimately won out. The country is so important that it is like a co-starring character.

The first three books to be filmed were Sidetracked, Firewall, and One Step Behind, although eventually the other novels would also be filmed. This article deals exclusively with the first three movies.

Sidetracked introduces us to the character of Kurt Wallander by immediately dousing us in the beauty of a Swedish field abloom with rapeseed (a bright-yellow flowering member of the mustard family–see the photo) that dominates the camera. Wallender has been called in because a young woman is hiding in the field. He tries to approach her, declaring himself as a policeman, but she pours a can of gas over herself and sets herself afire. Wallander is appalled and perplexed. “What’s our country coming to,” he asks, “when fifteen year old girls set themselves on fire?” In this first movie we discover that he is recently separated from his wife and that his grown daughter Linda (Jeany Spark) who is deeply concerned about his lifestyle, especially his hideous eating habits and his devotion to his job that frequently leaves him burned out and exhausted. He has a very difficult relationship with his father (David Warner), but Linda eventually brings them back together and Kurt discovers that his father now has Alzheimer’s. We also meet Wallander’s co-workers, most of whom are as devoted their work as he is. Anne-Britt Hoglund (Sarah Smart) works most closely with him, but the group of detectives also includes Kalle Svedberg (Tom Beard) and Magnus Martinsson (Tom Hiddleston) His investigation of the self-immolation eventually leads to a former police executive who is running a forced prostitution ring, supplying young girls, many foreign, to provide as virgins to wealthy businessmen.

Firewall begins with the murder of a cab driver by two young women who calmly turn themselves in and then wallow in a fatalist state that reveals nothing of why they did it. In this movie, Linda sets up her father to participate in an internet dating site and he eventually dates the first woman to respond, but his faith that he might actually be able to start over is severely shaken by developments in the story. His investigation of the murder uncovers a plot to bring down the European banking system by way of computer hacking.

The third film, One Step Behind, is a much more personal story as Wallander investigates a serial killer who is so random that no pattern can be discerned, even though they bring in a professional profiler to help them. He forms a close bond with a girl who might lead them to the killer, but she is murdered practically before his eyes. This leads him to a much deeper love for his own daughter, Linda. He also meets a very interesting woman who seems to understand what he is going through. Ultimately, the killer becomes more daring and brings his carnage to Wallander’s front door.

The directing, under the guidance of Philip Martin, is very smart, combining both documentary and drama film techniques to bring alive the landscape of Sweden. The films capture the modern architecture and the nearly surreal beauty of the countryside by using a very lightweight, high resolution digital camera. They create a kind of stark beauty that makes the movies each stand out as a visual delight, a rare and extraordinary imagery that doesn’t just bring the stories to life, but brings the landscape front and center. The use of color in the imagery consistently keeps the viewer in a state of hyper-realism that is bold and addictive.

Branagh is perfect as Wallander, creating a character that is completely believable and engaging, so personally involved in his work that the viewer is allowed to see a fully realized person, with all of his faults as well as his good points. He is very easy to identify with and that is part of what makes the movies so special. All of the supporting actors are also well cast and believable.

If there is any fault to find with the movies, it is that the first two mysteries are pretty easy to solve and there are points where you wonder why Wallander hasn’t put it all together. In those first two films, I knew who committed the murders long before the detective did, even though the directors did not tip it off. At a certain point, I realized that even though I knew who committed the crimes, the films concentrate so well on the personal aspects, Wallander’s character, and the nature of the landscape that it just wasn’t important. The third movie, however, works both as a mystery and as a great real-life drama and it makes me eager to see more.

I confess that I’m not a great fan of crime drama or murder mystery, but Wallander goes far beyond simple genre filmmaking, into a depth of character and landscape that makes each movie very special. I look forward to seeing more of the Wallander movies in the future!

Becoming Jane

November 7, 2014November 7, 2014 | Paul Wake Baker

Our general fascination with all things Jane Austen continues with this 2007 fictional glimpse into one short period of her life: that time when she was attracted to Tom Lefroy and would have formed an engagement if not for the objections of his family. I say fictional because the filmmakers have taken considerable license with what we understand as historical fact. This is something movies do all of the time, but with Jane Austen it is best to take special care because her fans are quite dedicated.

It is a Sunday morning in 1795 in Hampshire, England. At the cottage of the Reverend George Austen (James Cromwell), youngest daughter Jane (Anne Hathaway), toils away at her writing while her sister Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin) and the others sleep. When the servants get to work, Jane begins to play her piano loudly to wake everyone up. Cassandra has just become engaged to Robert Fowle (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) who must travel to the West Indies to earn his pulpit. The local grand dame, Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith) is resolved that her nephew, Mr Wisley (Laurence Fox) will marry Jane, despite her poverty, but Jane is much less certain. She desires to marry for love, not money, as is the custom.

Meanwhile, in London, young law student Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) drinks and carouses his way into the bad graces of his uncle, the Lord Chief Judge of the high court (Ian Richardson). Although he comes from a poor Irish family, his uncle is without heirs and Tom depends on the possible inheritance as the only way his family can survive. After a night of drinking, Tom arrives late to court and his uncle berates him for his lack of decorum. As punishment, and as a possible tonic for his Tom’s decadent lifestyle, his uncle sends him to the country to stay with relatives.

Arriving bored and angry, his friend Henry Austen (Joe Anderson) invites him to attend a tea to celebrate Cassandra and Robert’s engagement. Jane reads a lengthy, comedic tribute to the happy couple, but later overhears Tom disparaging her writing. In a pique of anger, she burns her marriage tribute and questions her other writing. Henry, one of Jane’s older brothers who has just graduated from Cambridge, has also brought a priggish friend, John Warren (Leo Bill) to the party and he becomes smitten with Jane, although she finds his bumbling manner offensive. Tom’s relations include his cousin, young Lucy Lefroy (Jessica Ashworth) who has a crush on Tom and hopes to make a match with him. A member of the Austen party is Jane’s cousin, Eliza, the Comtesse de Feullide, who had been married to a French count, beheaded during the Revolution. She takes a shine to Henry and hopes that her wealth will provide a means for him to become an officer in the English Navy.

Walking in the woods, Jane encounters Tom and they exchange uncivil words, but despite his criticism of her writing, Tom sees her intelligence and wit and is attracted to her. During an accidental meeting in the Lefroy library, he gives her a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones so that she can experience a more visceral form of writing. When they discuss the morality of it, he remarks that good people can come to a bad end, but Jane has already grasped the prime purpose of what a good novel should be. “A novel should reveal the true source of our actions,” she tells him. This is the heart of good fiction: action must be organic.

Mr. Wisley finally asks to Jane to marry him, but she cannot in good conscience say yes to him. She doesn’t love him, although she is beginning to respect him. Her mother (Julie Walters) is very distressed by this refusal, but her father takes it more in stride. Even so, he is realistic about the world. “Nothing destroys spirit like poverty,” he tells Jane. But Jane wants to marry for love and gradually realizes that she loves Tom. At a ball, Lady Gresham confronts Jane, telling her explicitly that her nephew’s offer of marriage is the best that Jane can ever expect in her life and that she has a duty to her impoverished family to accept. Outside, by the fountain, she and Tom profess their love to each other and pledge that they will try to find a way to make it work.

On the way to visit Jane’s older brother, Edward, Tom invites Jane, Eliza, and Henry to stay with his uncle in London, hoping that Jane will make a good impression, but at dinner, Jane contradicts the Lord Justice on the nature of irony and falls into disfavor. Unable to sleep, Jane begins drafting a new story, First Impressions, which turned out to be the first draft of Pride and Prejudice. Before Tom can tell his uncle that he wants to marry Jane, the Lord Justice receives a letter informing him that Jane is a penniless husband-hunter. He turns his back on them and Tom has only one option if he wants to inherit his fortune: he must abandon Jane.

Directed by Julian Jarrold, the movie was filmed almost exclusively in Ireland, with assistance from the Irish Film Board, mostly because Hampshire had become too clean and modernized. It is a beautiful film, no doubt. The cinematography by Eigil Bryld brings the English countryside to life, even if it was filmed in Ireland. Trust me, you won’t notice the difference.

The script, drafted by Sarah Williams and finalized by Kevin Hood, was based on a the book, Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Hunter Spence, uses some historical facts, but mashes everything up to create a good romantic film. The best of it provides terrific glimpses into influences on Austen’s writing, such as Lady Gresham’s remark that there is “a lovely-ish wood” nearby that Jane and Mr. Wisley could walk in or Wisley’s fragmentary remark that “it is a truth universally acknowledged.” Certainly Lady Gresham bears a striking resemblance to Lady Catherine de Bourgh and there is evidence that she used her own mother and father as models for Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Jane’s relationship with Cassandra is compared to Lizzie and Jane, but they could also be Elinor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. The bumbling John Warren is very close indeed to Mr. Collins. All of this is extremely well done, if a trifle obvious in places. It is a witty and emotional script, very well written. However, if readers are seriously interested in Jane Austen’s life, I would recommend the biography Jane Austen: A Life, by David Nokes. This is an excellent book and is much more factual than the movie.

The acting is first rate, especially the supporting cast. James Cromwell and Julie Walters as Jane’s parents are terrific, as are Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, and Anna Maxwell Martin. Helen McCrory is remarkable as Mrs Radcliffe, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho, whom Jane meets on her stopover in London.

James McAvoy brings a lot of soul to Tom Lefroy, elevating him far beyond the carousing rascal he starts out as, into a man who must carry his own pain with him throughout his life.

But the movie is centered around Jane Austen and Anne Hathaway’s performance is critical to the movie’s success. I have read that many English critics have found fault with her English accent and others are affronted by the fact that she is American and not English. These things did not bother me. And I found her performance to be very strong and very affecting. She amused me and moved me and must be accorded as giving a very good performance. My only issue is personal. I have a certain view on Jane Austen that has been fostered by my own reading, by my study of her biography, and by the one picture that seems to capture her essence. I think her weight was an essential part of her character, that her own roundness helped to reveal who she was. Hathaway is thin, she looks harshly angular and skinny and despite her truly remarkable performance I simply could not accept her as Jane Austen. Perhaps this is a failing on my part, but I would have much preferred to someone a little closer to Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC Pride and Prejudice.

I was also a little irked by the historical inaccuracies. For one thing, Jane Austen was incredibly well-read and was certainly familiar with Fielding’s Tom Jones as a classic of the times. I also found it troublesome that she would consider eloping with Tom Lefroy. Austen was a girl of her times and would not pull a Lydia Bennet. Their daft brother, George, was secreted away and the family never saw him, yet here he is included as if they saw him every week.

These are, of course, minor objections in a movie that largely succeeds and makes a worthy addition to film canon of Jane Austen. Everyone who is deeply into Austen should see the film and make up their own minds. For my part, I liked it in spite of myself. I was moved by both Jane and Cassandra and I loved their relationship. It is probably quite close to their real relationship and is very moving. Overall, I found the movie to very affecting and I must recommend it.