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)

You're Only A Day Away

Year: 2015

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie

Run Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Brad Bird was offered a chance to direct the new Star Wars film.When he said no and decided to make a passion project of his own, the reverberations were felt all around the physical realm. Somebody turned down Star Wars? And all that money? They must really care about their art!

And while I'm certain that Bird is a genuinely decent human being to be able to turn down an offer like that, the fact remains that his passion project, which became Tomorrowland, is about as artistic and personal as a Bazooka Joe comic. It's certainly one of the more messily intriguing blockbusters of the summer, but it's about as drearily generic and painstakingly earnest as they come.

Kind of like how an E.R./House crossover would be.

Tomorrowland tells the story of Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a teen girl whose father used to be an engineer for NASA. She can't handle the fact that NASA is shutting down their space program, in the process rendering her father obsolete. She still has hope for the future, so she sabotages the construction site around a launch pad that NASA has been trying to dismantle. Her repeated criminal activities land her in jail for a night, and when she is released, a pin with an ornate "T" on it is among her stuff.

When she touches it, she is transported to the mystical land of Tomorrowland - an alternate dimension built by snobby aristocrats and intellectuals where they could develop futuristic technology in peace - but the pin runs out of battery before she can fully explore it. Her quest for another pin leads her to a faraway sci-fi shop run by the strange caretakers Hugo (Keegan-Michael Key) and Ursula (Kathryn Hahn), a run-in with young girl android Athena (Raffey Cassidy), and the secluded farmhouse of Frank Walker (George Clooney) a man who, as a young boy, was given the opportunity to visit Tomorrowland, but was kicked out after inventing a machine that predicted the end of the world.

They must reluctantly team together to prevent the apocalypse, using Casey's optimism, Frank's know-how, and Athena's technological prowess to undermine the current, embittered leader of the now defunct Tomorrowland, Governor Nix (Hugh Laurie).

You'd think guns would help too, but they forget to bring any along.

At its heart, Tomorrowland really wants to tell an interesting story about the way humanity has been receiving the portentous messages about global warming and the various other ways we're ruining our own planet. It succeeds intermittently at this, especially in the final ten minutes, but for the most part it's cloying and pedantic, feeling more like one of those smarmy vegans who brags about just how much quinoa they can shove up their nose instead of a genuine, earnest plea for change.

This effect is achieved through an extremely labored script that positively aches for us to feel the full force of the clunky metaphors and heavily Meaningful subtext it pummels us with over and over. On top of it all Casey Newton contracts a lethally severe case of Special Snowflake Syndrome. Common among teen protagonists, it means that even though she is but a simple Ordinary Teen, she and only she has the imagination or creativity or dreaming or whatever to Save The World.

Lo! She can fix her dad's machine by plugging in a super obvious wire! Behold! She can instantly figure out any technology, no matter how futuristic or alien, papered over with the incessant, infuriating line "I know how things work." Oh, and the year Frank was kicked out of Tomorrowland for predicting a dystopian future? 1984. The film is about as subtle as a hippo in a tutu.

Though, come to think of it, the film might be improved if the protagonist was an actual hippo ballerina.

The film gets itself so worked up over teaching its Lesson that it occasionally forgets what it's doing entirely. An emotional beat that is incessantly foreshadowed during the first act of the film collapses at the end of the second with absolutely zero fanfare, and the stakes are never high enough to take the threat (which is integral to understanding the theme and the desperation with which it calls upon humanity) seriously.

But a certain amount of heaving, didactic, distracted humanism is to be expected from a film so utterly, thoroughly in love with Disney its lore. Cheerful easter eggs pepper the film, from small subtle background details to integral plot points (ie. the entrance to Tomorrowland is first discovered on the It's a Small World ride). Your level of Disney admiration will largely influence your appreciation of the film, though its mythology around Tomorrowland itself is entirely original.

In its quasi-religious Disney fervor, the film fails to set out some truly strict rules for its universe, so it becomes difficult to nail down exactly how Tomorrowland and its technology function. The logic is so strung through with holes, you could drive a car through it, but the fact remains that many of the ideas at work in the film are dizzily creative, at least in the idyllic Tomorrowland of the past. And the CGI used in the creation of this world is decent enough, though any and all giant robots look a little too pasted onto the screen. They have no weight and appear to be sandwiched in between the film's dimension and our own. It's highly unsettling.

Even more than the fact that an entire extra dimension houses only one city.

Just like everything else in Tomorrowland, the acting is a smidge uneven. George Clooney does the best of the pack, of course, but even he succumbs to the pulpy influence of the material, playing more of a caricature than a genuine human being with inner life. Cassidy has a hard time at first, but settles into her role, providing one of the best characters of the film in the process. And Robertson does a consistent job all the way through, though the frequent, extremely false bark that she pretends is a laugh is shrilly alarming. The actors playing young George Clooney and Casey's father are weak beyond belief for a studio picture, but they're not in the film enough to harm it. And any ensemble that contains both Key and Hahn will always have a positive average, when it comes down to it.

All in all, Tomorrowland is a strange, tottering behemoth. It's funny enough, the action is decent, and the characters are mildly engaging, but its flaws hang over it like a black mark. The chinks in the CGI armor, the spotty acting, the pedantic dialogue, and the "happy" ending that remains sourly elitist render the film a bit of a tough hunk to swallow. But Brad Bird pours his heart out into this film and a messy, all-over-the-place personal picture is worth a hundred times more than a messy, all-over-the-place studio picture. It's just true. If you feel the need to check it out, don't get your hopes up and you'll manage to have a good time.

Happy travels!

TL;DR: Tomorrowland is a messy, emotional wreck of a movie, but it's decently entertaining through and through.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'd say no, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give my good friend Matt a chance to speak his mind on why you should.

Word Count: 1253