No plain Jane

The big question everyone's quick to ask about a movie adaptation of a great piece of literature is, is it faithful to the book? It's a hopelessly vague question: a movie can be a book's mirror twin in tone and spirit but come off as an adoptive sister in narrative details -- and still hang together beautifully. If you ask a filmmaker to be a slave to detail, you end up with fussy copyists like Merchant and Ivory, who dither more about the depth of the ruffles on the women's hems than they do about the emotional core of their material. They don't seem to understand that sometimes what makes an adaptation work isn't how close a director or screenwriter comes to capturing a book on film; it's the number of dicy chances he or she takes and gets away with.

Director Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility isn't the Great Movie Adaptation the most rigid Jane Austen fans have been panting for -- which is what's good about it. Lee and screenwriter Emma Thompson pull away from Austen in just a few crucial places. Sense and Sensibility is a charming book, but also a maddening one. The heroines, sisters Elinor and Marianne, are a beautifully balanced chiaroscuro of temperaments: Marianne, romantic and flighty, but with a steadfast heart; Elinor, intelligent and reserved and far more sensitive than she ever lets on. What's frustrating about the book is that Austen underscores Elinor's sterling character by providing her with a painfully dull (if undeniably kind and true) love interest. Lee and Thompson know Elinor deserves better than the dullard Austen wrote -- and they give it to her.

If Lee and Thompson get the characters right, it's the movie's pacing that suffers. Thompson has pruned the story carefully, but you wonder whether she couldn't have sliced another half-hour out of it. Sometimes the movie clings too tenaciously to Austen's gentility and subtle elegance, then tries to jerk you awake with bursts of action, like a jumble of pet dogs barking and bounding toward the camera. Lee appears so intent on keeping Sense and Sensibility from becoming a petrified monument that it moves like a kind of machine: the plot seems to be driven by gears, and sometimes they creak.

But the movie does capture the exuberance just beneath Austen's reserved surface, and it lets us revel in that exuberance by jacking it up just a notch. The characters feel enriched: the apple-cheeked Kate Winslet makes a fine Marianne, who, perpetually flushed and breathless, falls for the dashing, poetry-loving Willoughby (Greg Wise) rather than the kind, long-suffering Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), who's sick with love for her. The Jane Austen Society of North America reportedly got its panties in a bunch over the casting of Hugh Grant as Elinor's suitor, Edward -- too appealing, they said. But if his handsome-flustered-schmo routine is getting to be shtick (it's the same thing he did on The Tonight Show), the movie needs his sex appeal and the sense of humor Thompson's screenplay gives him (something Austen didn't provide). Grant imbues Edward with just enough charisma to reassure us that, somewhere after that last reel, he isn't going to be a total washout in the sack.

You have to have a sexy Edward to play against Emma Thompson. She is, as always, luminous and utterly winning: just when you've decided that her secret weapon is her impossibly wide eyes, she flashes a smile like no other. (What is it about those strange, tiny teeth?) Thompson has played this role before: she's wistful, guarded, cautiously lovesick; she seems to have made those qualities her trademarks. She's still capable of surprises, though. In one of the picture's most moving and subtle moments, Edward happens upon Elinor talking to her horse in the stable. Her lips are moving, but you hear only a shiver of a whisper, and suddenly you're tipped off both to the character's cautiousness and to the vast well of feeling she keeps hidden inside: only the horse can know her secrets for sure.

And yet, as wonderful as Thompson is, Alan Rickman's Brandon is the emotional core of Sense and Sensibility. His performance is astonishing -- it's beautifully controlled but unabashedly romantic: your heart can break simply from the way he inclines his head and backs out of a room. His voice, sonorous as a cello, is perfectly steady, but his eyes spill all the secrets he guards so carefully. By the way he stands, by the way his coat hangs on his shoulders, you can't tell whether he's hopelessly defeated or just preternaturally elegant. His heartache seems to have seeped into his bones, but it only makes him more regal. He has more soul than even a great humanist like Austen could ask for. He's faithful to her in the very best sense of the word.