Austen again? Make it worth our while

That is bewitching, the idea of one’s happiness depending entirely on another person. It is not always possible,” says the pragmatic and introverted Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) to her impulsive sister, Marianne.These lines from the new Sense and Sensibility film, directed by Georgia Oakley, are indicative of the moral dilemma at the heart of not just this story, but Austen’s body of work as a whole. Based on the Jane Austen classic of the same name, the story follows the Dashwood sisters, their contrasting responses to their father’s death, and their subsequent search for suitable husbands.Adapt wellOakley’s version of Sense and Sensibility is under great pressure because the previous large-screen adaptation of the novel, Ang Lee’s 1995 film, starring and written by Emma Thompson (and which won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), is widely regarded as perhaps the greatest Austen adaptation of all time. Alongside the six-part TV series Pride and Prejudice (1995), where Colin Firth played a memorable Mr. Darcy, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility is widely credited for the Austen-mania that gripped Hollywood in the mid-to-late 1990s.Will Oakley’s self-assured and thoroughly modern adaptation join their ranks? Colin Firth played a memorable Mr. Darcy in the TV series Pride and Prejudice (1995). | Photo Credit: IMDB Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), starring Kate Winslet. | Photo Credit: IMDB Tamil adaptation of Sense and Sensibility in Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000) | Photo Credit: IMDB So, what qualities work for a really good Austen adaptation? Let me put the screenplay as the all-important foundation. Thompson’s screenplay for Lee’s film married quicksilver, super-witty repartee with Austen’s softer, more blatantly sentimental side. The key was to make sure Austen’s critiques of society travelled to the screen in a non-preachy way. Exposition has far less latitude onscreen than it does on the page — Thompson’s genius was in recognising this and making the necessary adjustments. In this context, a word also for Rajiv Menon’s excellent Tamil adaptation Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000), featuring an ensemble cast led by Mammootty, Aishwarya Rai, Abbas, Ajith and Tabu, with its screenplay written by Menon and dialogues by the noted Tamil novelist Sujatha.Let your hair downAnother important factor in modernising the settings of an Austen novel is to ensure the world you create stands on its own terms, not just as a super-faint, superficial echo of the English society Austen lived through. In other words, if you’re letting your hair down, go all the way with it, no half-measures. Two of my favourite Austen adaptations underscore this point — the 1995 Alicia Silverstone-starrer Clueless and the Bollywood film Aisha (2010). The 1995 Alicia Silverstone-starrer Clueless | Photo Credit: IMDB Bollywood film Aisha (2010) | Photo Credit: IMDB Both are modernised adaptations of Austen’s great comedy-of-manners, Emma, about a happily shallow, meddlesome protagonist who vastly overestimates her own matchmaking talents. Clueless worked because of the irresistible, all-too-familiar world of American high-school hi-jinks it created, with Silverstone’s character, Cher Horowitz, playing the queen bee to perfection. Similarly, the upper-class Delhi milieu of Aisha is a wonderful, incorrigibly mercantile and status-conscious setting, rich in intrigue and consumerist excess.Pass the pitfallsOne stratagem that absolutely does not work with Austen is the metafictional, self-referential dialogue that has infected so much of contemporary streaming. While Austen had a lot of stylistic traits considered “modern” for her era, self-referential logic-loops were not one of them. The Dakota Johnson-starrer Persuasion (2022) nevertheless broke the fourth wall relentlessly, talking to the audience ad nauseam, like Fleabag on steroids with none of the charm or wit of the Phoebe Waller-Bridge series. The Dakota Johnson-starrer Persuasion (2022). | Photo Credit: IMDB Another very common pitfall is the tendency to “flatten” Austen’s complex views on romance into the beats of a typical Hollywood romcom. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma (1996) is a typical example of this, as is the 2007 film Mansfield Park, which utterly wasted the considerable talents of its leading lady (Billie Piper) precisely this way. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma (1996). | Photo Credit: IMDB A side-effect of this phenomenon is also observed in casting — in Sense and Sensibility, Austen specifically introduces the character of Edward Ferrars as an awkward, not-handsome man who does not possess the charm of, say, a Darcy. And yet, even Oakley couldn’t resist the temptation to cast George MacKay, who’s bursting with Hollywood-good-looks and a weapons-grade jawline for the ages. George MacKay (right) in Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility (2026). | Photo Credit: IMDB Don’t get me wrong. I am genuinely delighted to see another Austen film on the large screen. It’s a nice, much-needed change of pace from the relentless waves of comic-book and video-game adaptations dominating Hollywood these days. I just wish that Oakley and her cast had avoided the missteps outlined above — and had added their own distinctive flourishes to a classic text.The writer is working on his first book of non-fiction.