Reviewing Jane: I Will Be Mistress Of Myself

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 1995

Director: Ang Lee

Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant

Run Time: 2 hours 16 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Emma Thompson is a force of nature, y'all. After over a decade of acting (and the occasional dabbling in TV writing) she undertook her first feature film screenplay, an adaptation of a literary giant. Although the Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility was part of the banner year that brought Jane Austen into the rabid mainstream popularity that she still enjoys today (also in 1995, the culture was buffeted by BBC's Pride and Prejudice miniseries and Amy Heckerling's Clueless), this was still a daunting undertaking.

She didn't even break a sweat, assembling a cast of future A-list superstars to breathe life into what still stands strong as one of the best Austen adaptations to date. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Let's jump back to the early 1800's for a moment, shall we?

In Sense and Sensibility, rich sisters Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet, two years before Titanic would change her life forever) live with their parents and kid sister. Unfortunately, their father passes away before either of them marry, leaving them penniless (his entire estate went to their half-brother, whose avaricious wife talks him out of supporting them). They move to a small cottage out in the country (with three bedrooms and two servants, the sheer poverty is overwhelming), where they have a variety of romantic adventures in which Elinor leads with her logic and Marianne dashes forward full force with her heart.

The men in their lives are awkward but charming brother-in-law (this is not the creepiest intra-family romance in the Austen universe, believe me) Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), the dashing but licentious John Willoughby (Greg Wise), and the older but devoted Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), who Marianne turns her nose up at without a second thought.

I mean, wouldn't you ignore Alan Rickman for the raw sensual power of that hat?

As we learned from this year's Oscars, where Parasite won Best Picture, sometimes the Academy gets it right. And they certainly did when they awarded Emma Thompson for Best Adapted Screenplay. The whole point of this project is weighing the way different people adapt Austen's work, and as Thompson's mighty act of rendering the original 1811 novel as a feature film is beyond compare. 

To start off, she does what I have been begging these screen adaptations to do from the very beginning, retaining the acidic sarcasm of Austen's original texts. The Austen novels have always been funny in a hyper-modern snarky way; you just have to crack open the period dialogue to get to that candy center. And this is an extraordinarily funny film, especially given the standards of your average Hollywood period piece costume drama. MVP goes to Imelda Staunton as a chatty, ditzy woman with a husband who visibly despises spending time with her, but the entire cast is expert at delivering Thompson's wickedly sharp dialogue, which sometimes directly draws out the best passages from the novel, and largely synthesizes the source text's themes and moods into new delicious combinations.

The reason the humor works especially well is because Thompson has done the legwork of making the period and the characters within it come to life, humanizing conflicts and interactions that might normally seem distant and outdated to a modern audience member. One trick I especially appreciate her using is the way she overlaps dialogue. Even in scenes when our main characters aren't speaking, there is boisterous conversation floating in through windows or from other rooms, bringing the world to messy, vibrant life instead of embalming it in stuffy, fussy costumes and sets that seem hermetically sealed from the real world.

Also it helps that they cast at least one movie star-handsome romantic lead, something the previous BBC adaptations perpetually failed to do.

All you need to stand out among the crowd of these Austen adaptations is a sharp script and actors who know how to deliver the material, which Sense and Sensibility confidently provides (Thompson, especially when she gets her big Oscar-worthy monologue, is reliably terrific on top of everything else). Unfortunately, there is something that doesn't quite connect emotionally, at least for this reviewer.

It doesn't help that Sense and Sensibility is mostly about the relationship between two sisters, and their interactions as they long for men from afar. Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman are necessarily forced offscreen for longer than one might like if we're meant to feel heaving romantic paroxysms. And while both Thompson and Winslet are delivering the material well, it's challenging to buy their sisterly relationship when the former is visibly 16 years older than the latter. While this casting choice at least visually highlights the way that Elinor is more capable and mature than her younger sister, it leaves a gaping crack in the foundation of the relationship that is meant to propel the emotional core of the movie. 

And frankly, of Ang Lee's mainstream, well-regarded works, this is the entry in which I find the least to be impressed with. While Thompson does all the legwork in bringing the characters to life, I find that Lee and his creative vision gets lost in the period detail rather than bringing the camera to life for more than a couple sweeping vistas.

But all that said, Sense and Sensibility is a terrific accomplishment that stands head and shoulders above most of the material I've covered in this marathon, especially among the adaptations that are actually set in the period. It was rightfully nominated for Best Picture, and while it should have lost to Babe, it shouldn't have lost to Braveheart, and we would all do well to remember that.

TL;DR: Sense and Sensibility is an adaptation that does great wonders in bringing Austen's humor and characters to life, even if it doesn't do the same with her passion.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1005

Other Films Based on Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
Kandukondain Kandukondain (Menon, 2000)
Material Girls (Coolidge, 2006)

From Prada to Nada (Gracia, 2011)
Scents and Sensibility (Brough, 2011)

Sense, Sensibility, and Snowmen (Winning, 2019)

Surely You Can't Be Sirius

Year: 2004

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the point where the series begins to settle in for the long haul. It’s still self-contained and epic-lite, not yet reaching the dark depths of the following entries, but the series first finds its personality in the chapters of this, the third book.

Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film in the franchise, is directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the man behind Gravity, my second favorite film of 2013 and one of the most perfect sci-fi thrillers ever created. Needles to say, he is a deeply idiosyncratic director capable of tremendously great things. Azkaban is not one of them, but it’s a damn sight better than the profoundly impersonal Chris Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, which feel like dusty museum pieces. Azkaban may have inherited many of their laws, but at the very least it crackles with much-needed life.

And great ties.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in case you have been buried in soft peat for the past 18 years out of reach of a library, tells the story of thirteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). When he returns to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his third year, he discovers that a violent escapee from the wizard prison Azkaban – Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) – has him in his sights. As a result, the school is being guarded by the dementors, a race of hooded, soul-sucking creatures that feed on happy memories and who affect Harry tremendously thanks to the atrocities in his past.

To help defend himself from the dementors, Harry takes extra lessons with the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Lupin (David Thewlis), with whom he develops and instant rapport. As the year wears on, Harry – along with his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), must battle the dementors, discover the truth about Sirius Black, and fight to save the life of Buckbeak the hippogriff – a favored companion of their friend Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) – after it nearly gores their rival Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) for being a douche with hair like a cantaloupe dropped from a skyscraper.

The mid-2000's were a hard time to be a teenager.

The jump in quality between Columbus and Cuarón is immediately apparent from the opening scene – which is the best in the series thus far - and continues until the very end, enveloping the film in a warm, loving embrace. The difference in the aesthetic and production design is legitimately staggering. 

The magical world of Hogwarts dusts itself off to become a nuanced, living, breathing organism that acts as an additional, fully fleshed out character. Included in the castle’s thorough redesign is a clock tower, a beautiful spindly bridge that could only be held up by magic, and a Stonehenge-like structure that connects the passage from the castle to the grounds. With these additions, Hogwarts becomes more open and fluid (not to mention unbelievably pretty), lending it a sense of unified geography instead of the previous films’ disjointed Rolodex of medieval-looking university broom cupboards.

The costume design is also similarly unstifled. Variations are provided in the black Hogwarts uniforms and the film introduces street clothes to the characters’ wardrobe, allowing them to switch up the color scheme and spruce up the one-note drabness of the previous, more book-reliant entries.

On top of all of this, Cuarón introduces some stylistic fillips that do wonders fleshing out the vast world around the miniscule scope of Harry’s school adventures with his friends. The film’s transitions are effortless, showing the castle in bustling action (my personal favorite touch being the use of the Whomping Willow to depict the passage of the seasons), allowing the film to sprint along at a spritely pace.

It’s a real breath of fresh air following the interminable Chamber of Secrets.

I could go on and on about how the film displays increased facility with framing, containing more singularly striking images than the other two films combined, or how the inclusion of a  “toil and trouble” musical motif introduces a cheerily baroque, almost medieval tone, but I must remember that my esteem for Azkaban is largely hyperinflated in comparison to its immediate predecessors. As a matter of fact, Azkaban has a tendency to get bogged down by almost the exact same problems, though they are fewer in number.

First and foremost, the plot, while more limber and fast-paced thanks to some well-executed excision, is a little too thin on the ground, cutting out important details. And I don’t mean “wah, wah, they cut out the reveal that Crookshanks is part kneazle, I’m a nerd, kick me.” I mean, “The third act is based almost entirely on a series of revelations that hinge upon information we weren’t actually given.” Yes, it’s true that most of the modern world has read the Harry Potter books. But that’s no excuse to lazily leave half your character moments scattered on the cutting room floor like they’re so many intern corpses.

Prisoner of Azkaban is likewise weighed down by an uncommonly shaggy cast. The child actors neither match their highest highs nor their lowest lows, trapped in an unremarkable limbo, but the adult cast buries its shiniest gems too deep into the third act. Beginning with Mark Williams’ unfocused turn as Arthur Weasley, the torch of mediocrity is carried beyond the prologue by David Thewlis’ stop-and-go performance. Their acting is about as patchy as their robes. In addition, Michael Gambon (replacing the late Richard Harris as Headmaster Dumbledore) has yet to settle into the ethereal otherness of the role, and Potter mainstays Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman are unceremoniously stacked in a disused corner.

The newcomer trio of Emma Thompson (as the flighty Divination professor Sibyl Trelawny), Gary Oldman (as the shattered, hollow Sirius Black), and Timothy Spall (as the sniveling, smarmy Peter Pettigrew) are all unforgivably incredible, but their best work comes after a Lord of the Rings-length slog through bare adequacy. Thanks to the hard-earned efforts of a solid cast at their most mediocre, the film’s emotional beats feel cold and perfunctory.

Like a Goosebumps book in the freezer.

The film slightly makes up for these deficits with an omnipresent puckish sense of humor. But sometimes it slips too far into kiddie territory, most notably with a Jamaican shrunken head that talks, which will make you want to fill your ears with cement.

The last bastion of quality in Prisoner of Azkaban is the special effects, which are without qualification the best of the series up to this point. Maybe the extra year gap between 2002’s Chamber of Secrets and Azkaban allowed CGI technology to catch up with the series’ ambition, or maybe the FX crew simply cared more. Who knows. 

They grew a smidge too self-indulgent when they made the decision to digitally animate a dog instead of doing the blisteringly easy thing and picking one up from the pound, but the rendering of the creatures – Buckbeak in particular – is superb, largely free of the alienating side-effect of looking like the monsters are occupying some dimension that’s next door to ours. They even figured out how to make Hagrid work, allowing him to share frame with other actors, rather than sit up all on his lonesome in claustrophobic low angle close-up shots.

The only rough patch is the (SPOILERS – oh, who am I kidding) werewolf, but that’s more the fault of a goofy design than shoddy animation.

Am I a man, or am I a muppet?

So there you have it. Prisoner of Azkaban is unmistakably the best early Harry Potter movie, but it’s still an early Harry Potter movie. There’s a lot more to chew on in a much more manageable time frame, recommending this film far more than the others in the original three, more child-oriented Potters. It’s not Cuarón’s best work, but it’s still Cuaróns work, and that counts for a lot.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is emotionally thin but aesthetically ebullient.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1357
Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)