Sense & Sensibility & Nurturing the Lizard Brain
Warped Thanksgivings, COVID, and watching a classic 27 years late.
I spent since approximately July very excited about Thanksgiving. My partner and I had decided to host people at our place — our first time hosting something that wasn’t just a Friendsgiving but also a family affair. We invited my mother and sister down from Oregon. My paternal aunt, my brother, his wife, and their twin teen boys were coming. We’d also invite any friends who happened to be in town.
Then everything unraveled, piece by piece. A surgery kept my mother and sister planted in Oregon (don’t worry, everyone’s OK). My brother and I briefly toyed with flying up to be with them, but that didn’t work out. A thousand other small things not worth getting into bubbled up as conflicts. Seemingly every other week there was a new obstacle to gathering family for this holiday. But I’d set my sights on it. Every obstacle felt like small messages from the universe: “Why did you think this was possible?” “You’re not grown enough to make this happen.” “The people you want to show up for you aren’t always going to show up and you can’t make them.”
In the first weeks of November, though, it seemed like we’d finally landed on a Thanksgiving plan that worked. My aunt, my brother’s family, and a nice scattering of friends could make it. It was happening!
Then I got Covid. My stomach sank as the line solidified on the rapid test. I wouldn’t be out of the woods by Thanksgiving.
This did a number on my brain, lemme tell you. So did being cordoned off in our guest room for ten days, trying desperately not to infect my partner. This time around my symptoms were mild, but cabin fever set in fast. I caught up on every show I’d been meaning to. Sex Lives of College Girls made me laugh. White Lotus validated my pre-existing fixations on Meghann Fahy and Aubrey Plaza. Nothing, though, was scratching the deep psychic itch inside me.
Enter Sense & Sensibility…
Midway through my isolation I was so desperate to be mentally activated again that I started brainstorming romance concepts. I opened my Notes app and started a new list jotting down every trope, job, and basic character situation I wanted to explore one day in my writing for novels or onscreen. Maybe it was a way of reconnecting with senses that I was blocked off from in my quarantine room? Regardless, it got me thinking quite a lot about what romances really hit. Like deep down in our bellies hit. The ones that resonate and stay with people.
I’d rewatched all my favorites far too recently. I have too much of the 2005 Pride & Prejudice memorized, so a rewatch in my isolation hovel wouldn’t have helped much with the stimulus I was craving. I needed to watch something new. I needed that feeling of discovery. Of surprise. My lizard brain demanded it.
Then I remembered Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Sense & Sensibility.
It was ridiculous that I hadn’t seen it before. I literally already owned a copy of the screenplay — though that was more because it comes coupled with Emma Thompson’s diaries from the production, and my worship for her goes deep.
Of course, that just made it more ludicrous I’d never bothered to watch the movie the diaries are attached to. It was a staple to so many who came up in the ‘90s, but for some reason it never made an appearance in my house, at least as far as I could remember.
But it was time. And I fell immediately.
I cannot emphasize enough how little I knew about Sense & Sensibility. I knew:
It was by Jane Austen, whose work I loved.
It had been adapted by Emma Thompson, for which she’d won an Oscar and given one of the best Golden Globe speeches of all time.
She’d written very witty diaries I’d seen snippets of on Tumblr.
Alan Rickman is in it and woos an uncomfortably young Kate Winslet.
That’s all I had. This meant I got to go on a genuine ride, going into a classic with almost no idea what it was about or what was going to happen to the characters. That’s exceptionally rare, and I had to treasure the privilege.
Turns out Sense & Sensibility is about a mother (Gemma Jones) and daughters (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, and Emilie François) who are turned out of their own home after the patriarch of the family dies and their inheriting brother leaves them nothing. It’s an incredibly painful time for these women — and TBH it’s on sight for John and Fanny Dashwood. I would like to punch them in their snooty faces.
The badness of their situation is soothed, somewhat, by their meeting of dashing men. Classic, classic Austen. Luckily for everyone this starts happening immediately, with the arrival of Hugh Grant, fresh off Four Weddings and a Funeral. He and eldest, sensible sister Elinor (Thompson) hit it off immediately — especially when Edward (Grant) charms adventurous kid sister Margaret (François) out of her grief hovel and teaches her to fence. Here is the exact moment this movie won my devotion:
There is something deeply soothing about this movie, and for me it’s in a completely different way than what Pride & Prejudice offers. There’s character overlap in the worlds of the Bennets and the Dashwoods (both have charming slutty rakes and close relationships with an eldest sister whose emotional repression is holding her back)…but Sense & Sensibility, especially as reimagined by Thompson & Lee, lives so intently in the world of these women. It always comes back to them. It is always grounded in them. You are left feeling that they are your dear friends, and that you’ll fight their various fuckboys to the death as you would for any loved one.
I won’t do a full recap. I will say, however, that I watched this movie on the edge of my seat. I had to stop myself Googling 211-year-old spoilers. The stakes were high — I wanted so badly for my new friends to be happy. For Marianne (Winslet) to realize that while it may soothe you to know someone loved you, that doesn’t mean he loved you well enough. For Elinor to edge one inch past her deep-seated need to be steady, stable, and good — to stand up in honor of her own wants and not just everybody else’s. I also quite enjoyed Alan Rickman’s performance as a wounded, yearning older man, and Hugh Grant’s as bumbling, stunted Edward. Gemma Jones, as usual, is an incredible weeping mother of ‘90s British cinema.
As adapted by Thompson and Lee, there’s a rawness to this film that lends a new lens to a very buttoned-up genre. I loved it so, so much.
Sense & Sensibility was exactly what I needed at a time when I was grappling with deep disappointment. I was locked away from all the slices of the world I wanted to consume, and the silver lining was finding an old classic that quickly became one of my favorite movies. I know I’ll return to it again and again.
In fact, I returned immediately. I pulled the screenplay off my bookshelf and dove right in to Thompson’s journals.
Read Emma Thompson’s diaries. Do it. You can buy them here.
*this is an affiliate link. I would be pushing this book on you regardless, though. You can also buy it here.
Thompson worked for five years on adapting Sense & Sensibility. Every time she’d finish shooting a project she’d go back to do another draft of the script. The diaries pick up as the film enters pre-production and follows Thompson and the rest of the cast and crew through months of navigating wind, water, and Hugh Grant’s sex scandal in the British countryside.
I’d only ever read specific parts of these diaries, but I dove back in with a vengeance after watching the movie. They’re so good — so frank, emotional, and funny — that it almost got me back into journaling in my own life. I talked myself out of it, though. I would have just been trying to be as witty as Emma Thompson, and that’s a losing battle for anyone.
I am happy, for now, living in Emma Thompson’s memories. It feels nice to relate so deeply to what she writes about screenwriting (“I spend the rest of January in tears and a black dressing gown”) and her time on set.
Here is a flurry of bits I took pictures of as I read. Each one involved me muttering “ugh, she’s so cool” to myself.
There is just so much good here. Including this moment where the man who would eventually become her husband arrives, “full of beans and looking gorgeous.”
It’s a rich text, I’m telling you.
Read it, I’m telling you. It was a balm to the soul during a week that stretched my psyche to its limits.
I didn’t get Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving, but my family came through this weekend. I roasted a chicken and didn’t fuck it up. It was good. Now I’m writing in my comfiest onesie, drinking tea on a rainy morning. Thank you, Sense & Sensibility, for helping me get to the point where everything sucks a bit less.
While we’re here: Please, please tell me your thoughts on 1995’s Sense & Sensibility. I am desperate to talk about it.
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[SPOILERS FOR A 30-YEAR-OLD MOVIE AHEAD]
The weeping Emma Thompson does when she finds out Hugh Grant isn't married after all -- including the little hand wave and then the eventual laugh/weep combo with her radiant and watery smile -- is my favorite crying-acting in all of cinema.
Thank you for reminding me how much I love this movie!
I love this movie so much and now I need to do a rewatch because it’s been a while. I forgot how beautiful this movie is and tend to watch Pride and Prejudice (2005) on repeat. Also you’re the second person that has recommended reading Emma Thompson’s diaries 📔, so I need to get on it stat. Lol.