Jane Austen on Screen

...the moment when Mr...

...Today the only way to tell the hero from the villain in most films is likely to be the fact that, although he too blows his opponents to smithereens with Molotov cocktails, at least he takes care that his incendiary devices are lead-free...

...I will even venture to say that director Ang Lee and screenwriter Emma Thompson have in some respects improved upon the Austen original...

...Like Shakespeare, Austen is able to expose the foolishness of her characters caught up in the tangled webs of romantic love without leading us to despise them or lose sympathy with their predicaments...

...Indeed, the film wants them to recapture the impulsiveness, spontaneity, and even rebelliousness of young love, a point epitomized by a false note- the moment when, contrary to anything Austen would allow, Wentworth kisses Anne publicly in the street...

...Fortunately, with the success of films like Howards End, the movie industry evidently felt primed for a series of period pieces...

...trying to transpose them to different eras and different settings invalidates everything that makes these remarkable works of art what they are...

...Judged by the exacting standards of Austen's novel, the film version of Persuasion fails to measure up, but judged against other movies today, it does rather well...

...Written earlier than Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility is a more conventional work and does not make as extensive use of the novelistic devices Austen later mastered...

...The difference from what happens in Persuasion is that there the filmmakers are captive themselves of the cinematic stereotypes they use, whereas Thompson and Lee knowingly use cliches to make us see key moments through the eyes of the characters, thus manipulating point of view as skillfully as Austen herself does...

...They have tightened up the plot, eliminating some minor characters and incidents like the duel between Colonel Branson and Mr...

...The makers of Persuasion deserve credit for a sincere effort to remain faithful to Austen...

...The dialogue at times is taken nearly verbatim from Austen's text...

...The camera work, the composition of individual scenes, and the editing of the film are so skilled and intelligent that they brook comparison with Austen's own command over putting together a novel...

...Thompson and Lee do something similar cinematically...

...Paul Cantor is professor of English at the University of Virginia...

...The point of Austen's tale is that, however unfortunate their eight-year separation may have been, fortunately in the interim they have changed- grown and matured-so that their rekindled love will in fact have a more solid and presumably long-lasting foundation...

...If Francis Ford Coppola ever hears about the Gothic elements in Northanger Abbey, he may option the book and give Gary Oldman another chance at making a fool of himself in a wig...

...And yet, at a time when Martin Scorsese's answer to Brian DePalma's having a character bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in The Untouchables is to have two characters bludgeoned to death with baseball bats in Casino, it is hard to believe that we are in the midst of a boom in films based on the writings of Jane Austen...

...In general, the film tends to shy away from exploring the inner lives of its characters in any depth...

...Instead, director Roger Mitchell and writer Nick Dear work hard to get the details right, from the costumes to the settings...

...The actors and actresses turn in uniformly solid performances, with Susan Fleetwood as Lady Russell and John Woodvine as Admiral Croft particularly successful in their roles...

...The current Austen boom began somewhat less than auspiciously with the aptly named Clueless, a supposed update of her novel Emma to present-day Beverly Hills It is difficult to take its parallels with Austen's Emma seriously when the high school students it portrays make the generation pictured in its director's teenage-morons epic of 1982, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, look like graduates of Cal Tech...

...The film preaches exactly the opposite message: that youthful dreams can come true if only you remain patient and the wars go your way...

...As a result, we now have versions of Austen's Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility in general release...

...The latest entry in the Austen sweepstakes, Sense and Sensibility, has an odd advantage over Persuasion: It is based on a lesser novel...

...It may well be the best movie ever made from any Austen novel...

...In contrast to what happens in the recent Scarlet Letter featuring Moore, Anne's interest in one of her suitors is not kindled by a glimpse of him swimming naked off the coast of Lyme...

...And that is precisely what fascinates Austen-the interior conflicts that keep her hero and heroine from reuniting in love after an eight-year separation...

...Unfortunately, none of Austen's characters is quite as witty and intelligent as she...

...One would think that such fine moral distinctions would be lost on contemporary audiences...

...The result, paradoxically, is that the film version of Sense and Sensibility ends up being truer to the spirit of Austen than the film version of Persuasion, and also just a better movie: funnier, livelier, more thoroughly enjoyable...

...One can only hope that this little boom in Austen films will remind the industry that it is still possible to sell movies on the basis of time-honored literary qualities: engaging characters, articulate dialogue, well-shaped plots, and serious themes...

...But ultimately the very devices that make her such a great novelist prove difficult to translate to the screen...

...They did not cast Demi Moore as the heroine, Anne Elliot...

...This is misleading...

...Even in this early novel, one thing Austen does brilliantly is to write scenes filled with literary clich?s when she wants to show her characters' lives are being governed by ideas they have learned from books...

...Willoughby that leaves both untouched and is pointless...

...In the meantime, Mansfield Park, anyone...

...several sequences capture Austen's social satire effectively...

...But in reducing what keeps Anne and Wentworth apart to happenstance, the film tends to obscure what makes them distinctive as lovers...

...Mitchell and Dear insist on assimilating Austen's heroine and hero to precisely the stereotypical patterns of romantic love that she constantly calls into question in her novels...

...At several points in the film, the once-rejected Wentworth is about to declare his love for Anne when only a simple interruption from some other character forestalls him...

...Dear admitted as much himself: "I think one of the major difficulties was trying to replace the wit that's in Jane Austen's narrative, but which you can't use because it's almost all in the author's voice telling us about characters, with a certain wit or lightness that came from the characters themselves...

...But despite such meticulousness, something is missing from this Persuasion-and that something is, alas, Jane Austen, or rather, the wit and intelligence that shine forth in her writing...

...In particular, the film works to differentiate and deepen the principal male characters, who remain somewhat shadowy in Austen's text, especially Edward Ferrars, but spring to life on the screen, in part because of superb performances such as Alan Rick-man's Colonel Brandon...

...She is a master at allowing her characters to reveal themselves-largely their foibles and their follies-indirectly and almost against their wills, but such effects depend on techniques in her prose for which it is not easy to find cinematic equivalents...

...A new version of Pride and Prejudice is coming from Britain to American cable television, and several adaptations of Emma are in the works...

...Using what are only hints in the novel, the film stages several scenes in which reading poetry out loud becomes centrally important and serves to differentiate the characters' attitudes toward both literature and life...

...Perhaps as a result, the makers of the film felt freer to transform the novel in bringing it to the screen...

...Willoughby rides out of the storm to save Marianne Dashwood is a pure movie clich...

...Not that the wit is entirely absent from the film...

...At least the fact that it is based on Austen makes the film literate and thoughtful in a way that has become increasingly rare these days...

...Instead, the film version generally substitutes accidental and external obstacles for Austen's psychological barriers...

...At the same time, they develop certain characters further than Austen does, such as the youngest of the Dashwood sisters, Margaret...

...It tells us something about the distinctive world of her novels that one character in Persuasion becomes unsuitable in the eyes of a woman he is courting when it comes out that he has been known to travel on Sundays...

...in fact, the credits say that the film is "adapted from," rather than "based on," the novel by Jane Austen...

...The falsest note is struck right at the end: Anne and Wentworth quite literally sail off into the sunset, thus turning the sober reflective moment with which Austen chooses to end her novel into a cheap romantic clich...

...She wants to show a very adult and intelligent Anne and Wentworth who have learned a sobering and moderating lesson about the compromises society demands...

...and filmed accordingly, but one that is appropriate to give a sense of how Willoughby is in a sense a creation of the overly romantic imagination Marianne has developed from her reading...

...And yet in their own way they are quite apt and serve to bring out the Shakespearean dimension of Austen's achievement...

...The film of Sense and Sensibility works very successfully to bring out Austen's central theme of the way literature shapes life...

...If anything, Clueless proved a reminder of how firmly rooted in a specific historical and social reality Austen's novels are...

...Those who have not read the novel may in fact be surprised to learn that the film's quotations from Shakespeare are not in the original text...