Also play on Twitter!

Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Stripped too much — Written by droplul on 11.04.2015

This review contains a minor spoiler.

'Sense and Sensibility' is rated a 7,7 on the IMDB. In my opinion that's too high.

It is too high because the story is so much different from the book. Of course it's true that compromises are always necessary when a film is made based on a book.
Not everything that is written can be translated into an image. For example the thoughts of a person. It is possible to let the viewer know what a person feels by a look on his/her face but the literal words are impossible to translate to an image. Unless a voice over is used, but let's not go into that right now.
Long descriptions of how the environment looks like are also hard to translate to film.

In this case I think there are too much compromises were made.
The pass of the movie is very high compared to the book, it jumps from one big event to the other. In the book a great deal of the personal development of the characters happens in the quieter moments in between these events. Even though it is hard to translate those scenes into an image I would have liked to see more of those scenes in the movie. It would have added a lot of context to the events and also it would have given the movie more depth.
I was very surprised to find out that Mr. Willoughby didn't return towards the end of the movie. In the book he returns and though it's brief it adds a lot excitement to the story.

The movie was made to be as much like the book as possible. It was not based on the book in the sense of 'The Three Musketeers ' (2013) which just took a few aspects from the book and created a new story with those. If it had been like that with 'Sense and Sensebility' I wouldn't have minded at all. Since it was an attempt to create a film as close to the book as possible I think the attempt in this way was poor. With a few changes and additions to the story in the movie it would have been closer to the book and would have had a lot more depth.

I would only recommend this movie to people who haven't read the book and don't plan to read it. If you don't know the book it is still a good costume drama to watch.

Ajax loader on white

Sense and Sensibility Reviews

Advertisement