From Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) comes an irresistible new take on Jane Austen’s iconic Sense and Sensibility: a charming, witty, and deeply relatable story of love and sisterhood starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Caitríona Balfe, George MacKay, and Fiona Shaw.
The Garden Cinema View:
It must be daunting to tackle an Austen novel which already has such a beloved adaptation – especially as Ang Lee’s 1995 version features an almost mythical cast (Thompson, Rickman, Winslet, Grant) in the principal roles. How refreshing then to find the increasingly impressive Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) finding her own route through one of Austen’s more melodramatic and elaborately written classics. Without going full Andrea Arnold-Wuthering Heights, this is a naturalistic and at times earthy vision, full of candle-lit rooms and elemental countryside. Oakley draws out the local specificities of early 19th century Sussex, Devon, and London to give the corresponding sections distinctive flavours. She elaborates on events alluded to in the novel for dramatic intensity yet is not afraid to lean into the epistolary nature of Regency society, which lends a curiously elliptical structure to some of the narrative twists. That this succeeds is due to a fine cast who successfully emerge from the shadows of their a-list forebearers, with Daisy Edgar-Jones holding everyone in orbit with a tremendous performance at the centre of things as Elinor Dashwood.
