"What Do You Know of Anything but Your Own Suffering?"
The 30th anniversary of a ravishing but slightly neglected masterpiece
A couple of weeks ago Will Talvin wrote this great article in N+1 Magazine about the negative impact of streaming on movie making, particularly at the script level. He cited a passage from an Adam Sandler movie as an example of Netflix movies at their worst, along with a description of why films like this are so bad:
The nicest thing to say here is that every type of writing has its own challenges. An author naturally wants to luxuriate in the world that they have created, for their own enjoyment, for that of the reader, and to flesh out the world. But in a movie, time and viewer attention are in short supply; in order to be interesting everything has to manifest itself visually, as something the character says or does that communicates information in a dynamic way and moves the action forward. It’s a compressed style of writing that leaves room for little else — which is why poorly or carelessly executed ones like “Murder Mystery” read like a corpse-pit of mangled expository meat.
If you’re looking for a contrast, the Ang Lee directed adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is 30 years old this year. It provides almost a textbook example of what happens when merciless efficiency of a movie script is executed in as elegant and subtle a way as possible; and it highlights both how so bad many streaming movies are, and how difficult screenwriting is.
In the film Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet play sisters (Elinor and Marianne respectively) who find their financial and romantic fortunes suddenly upended when their father dies, leaving them and their mother with a meager inheritance. Elinor and Marianne represent two poles of emotional expression - Marianne is passionate, extrovert and impetuous, Elinor dutiful, restrained and responsible. We are introduced to them at the point that they have been booted out of their lavish home, which has been willed to their half-brother and his vulture-like wife. In the very first scene in which they appear, Marianne is infecting everyone around her with her mood by pounding out glum elegies on the piano; Elinor is gently trying to discourage her for the sake of their mother’s feelings. The scene is the first minute here:
So in about 60 seconds the film communicates everything we need to know about the two main characters of the movie - Elinor is a peacekeeper who represses her own personality in order to support those around her, and Marianne is incapable of moderating her impulses to the smallest degree, even when it causes emotional distress to those she loves. It’s not uncommon for movies to do this - to begin with a scene that quickly summarises its main characters and themes. The difference with Sense and Sensibility is the clarity and deftness with which it does that, and that it maintains that skill and purpose in every scene for the entirety of the movie.
It’s in the finer details that the qualities of a piece of art reveal themselves, and notwithstanding the above we can see the best of Sense and Sensibility in its treatment of its most minor characters. A perfect example is Pigeon, a member of the household staff of Mrs. Jennings, a relative of the main characters who takes them under her wing. When Mrs. Jennings and party arrive at her London mansion, Pigeon greets them at the door and immediately suggests to Mrs. Jennings “the ordering of coal” to which Mrs. Jennings dismissively replies “never mind you and your coal”. Later on during their stay Marianne comes down to breakfast to interrupt Pigeon and Mrs. Jennings in the midst of a dispute about one of his co-workers over a ham - Mrs. Jennings closes it off by saying “I don’t want to hear about the ham, you’ll have to sort it out between yourselves.”
During this period of the movie Marianne is frantically writing letters to, and awaiting letters from, a suitor who has clearly abandoned her. Pigeon is continually harassed for updates and sent to deliver letters, a task he holds in naked contempt, and which he takes no trouble to disguise as being an incredible nuisance. At one stage Marianne, desperate, sends a letter in the middle of the night. Pidgeon responds to the summons and arrives at her door with steam all but shooting out of his nostrils for having his sleep interrupted. The script says “A slight knock at the door heralds a much-ruffled PIGEON, wig askew. MARIANNE hands him the letter. He bows and goes, highly disgruntled.”
Here’s why this matters: Pigeon has a total of perhaps 30 seconds screen-time, and maybe three lines, some of which are muffled or truncated. Let’s contemplate for a moment how complete a picture the movie gives us of him and of his world in this time. He’s fussy, petty and put-upon; he has an irritable relationship with those around him, even his mistress, who is well used to his habits and greets them with a kind of brisk contempt. He regards any kind of request outside of the normal run of his duties (and many within them) as an absurd inconvenience and he makes no effort to disguise that fact.
As well as the personality of the man himself, that gives us an insight into the lives of domestic help that we normally wouldn’t have. They existed to wait on their employers hand and foot but the reality is they were also normal humans with limited amounts of patience, interest and talent. The fact that you could wake them to perform their duties in the middle of the night didn’t mean that was a nice thing to do on a human level (although the wealthy people of that era didn’t care). In less than a minute total on-screen time we get a complete and colourful portrait of an individual of a very specific type that we can recognise from our own lives, trailing a whole world and way of life behind him with equal vividness. Every character and every moment in the film is like this.
A movie is more than just its script and Sense & Sensibility weightiness is down in large part to immaculate sets and costume design. The overall look of the film contributes as well - every time I watch I am reminded of the quote by a famous cinematographer (it was either Wally Pfister or Roger Deakins) that the reason Marvel Movies are so ugly is that every scene is lit like it took place in an office or flood-lit stadium, and that natural light is a key to making something look beautiful on screen. Many of the shots in Sense and Sensibility are evidence like this, being Vermeer-like in their composition and gentle luminosity.
The direction adds to the effect. In the below scene (starting at 5:00 mins) Elinor has received news that the person she is in love with has forgotten her at her lowest moment. It took me many rewatches to understand why the camera’s prim withdrawal at the end of the scene helped make it so devastating, but eventually you realise that it’s doing what all going movies should - dramatising the emotional action in visual terms. Elinor’s defining feature is that she suppresses her true feelings at great personal cost - in the dialogue we all but hear her heart slam shut, and the camera pushes itself away from the action just as Elinor pushes her feelings and her family away with her reserve. It’s at least the equal of the similar but more famous and move in Taxi Driver where the camera slides away from Travis and towards the hallway because it cannot bear to watch him make a humiliating phone call.
The richness of the movie also helps highlight the stupidity of the recent conversation around Media Literacy and its reduction of all art to a one-dimensional commentary on oppressor/ victim dynamics. (For anyone who doesn’t know, “Media Literacy” in this sense when you laugh at someone for believing that a worthwhile artist could exist who did not hold the cultural views of an especially self-satisfied Teen Vogue columnist born in 2002.) Characters derive a justifiable sense of self-worth in part from their willing acceptance of the limitations of their society, not from kicking against it. We love and admire both Elinor and Edward (her love interest played by Hugh Grant) exactly because of their temperateness, their steadfastness, and their willingness to bear suffering without complaint even though those things are with rather than against the grain of the restrictive social conventions of their time. Kate Winslet’s Marianne speaks not only for herself but for the audience when she admits to Elinor of her youthful indiscretions with an unreliable man “… I do not compare my conduct with his… I compare it with what it should have been… I compare it with yours.” None of that is to forgive or justify socially-constructed cruelty, but to say that people's lives are more than the sum of the worst things that their culture does to or with them, that a great soul will find meaning within its social context, and that that’s worth something. Great art, like life itself, is complicated, and “Media Literacy” as currently understood is dunderheaded and philistine.
The clumsiness of the Netflix movies makes us pine for the relative refinement and high production values of older movies. It may be the case that there’s as much good stuff as ever there was, it’s simply that there’s way, way more bad or mediocre stuff than ever before, and the delicacy and purity of something good will always be overwhelmed by coarser and noisier tastes. In any case, rewatching Sense and Sensibility is like a cool glass of water on a hot day - you never knew how much you needed it until you got it, and it’s almost alarming how much relief it provides. A lot of that is of course down to the source material and a substantial amount of the dialogue is taken direct from Jane Austen’s book - but the relentless economy of the the script, the lush costuming and sets, and the intricate richness the performances belong only to the movie. It’s impossible to watch the emotional climax of the film, where Elinor finally turns on her overbearing sister with the devastating hiss of “what do you know of anything but your own suffering”, and feel that the source material is doing all the work.
Many of Sense and Sensibility best qualities are subtle and only reveal themselves on multiple rewatches, and it may be that our palette’s have been deadened by too many “Muderder Mysery”-type productions to notice them. It’s nevertheless surprising that the film isn’t more frequently cited as the ravishing masterpiece it is. Thirty years is the blink of an eye, so there’s still time to change that. I believe it’s available to watch on Netflix, ironically enough…
During the 1990s I read dozens of the classic 19th century novels (though not Sense and Sensibility). I also watched numerous TV/Film adaptations of them, but I gave up on those by the middle of the decade as the film makers never seemed to do the original justice.
The problem, it seemed to me, was that the BBC or Merchant Ivory had spent so much on getting the interior decor and costumes just right that they wanted this stuff to be on the screen for minutes at a time, so it was often like watching a filmed play with little camera movement or even much use of close ups. To me a Dickens novel with manic characters and tremendous energy should be filmed like the opening 20 minutes of Goodfellas.
So it's interesting to hear that a director like Ang Lee managed to actually enhance the source material and I will make time to watch it.
Strangely, just after reading this article I caught a bit of Piers Morgan's YouTube debate show which featured a white lady complaining about white privilege. I thought 'who is this loon ?' and so googled and found her name was Myriam Francois, a Muslim convert who campaigns for hate speech laws. But in the 1990s she was child actress Emilie Francois who had 'earned critical acclaim as Margaret Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility'.
Thank you for the recommendation! My wife and I watched it last night and really enjoyed it.