Kate is great

No, Kate Oches, sorry, not you. Although we think you are pretty great too. This post refers to Kate Winslet. Yes, she of the two Golden Globes and one Oscar---this year alone.

It is occasioned by last night's watching of the 1995 Sense and Sensibility. It is now more than 13 years since I first saw this movie. As I recall that was at a cinema in Wheaton, MD, and I went home and woke up the next morning to find six inches of snow on the ground. It kept snowing for 12 more hours. My first American blizzard. But I digress.

One disturbing thing about re-watching this film 13 years later is that then I identified more with Hugh Grant than Alan Rickman. Now I am definitely more in the Colonel Brandon category. Although at least I did not transition from Hugh Grant to Huw Laurie. (Pre-House, he spends the movie making bitter remarks about his clueless wife.)

I also caught feminist threads in the movie that I'm not sure I would've spotted in 1996. And I found different attitudes in book and movie about what is unsaid. "I like her because she talks about things that are interesting" complains Margaret (the youngest Dashwood) at one point. She's speaking about Mrs Jennings, who if I remember correctly ultimately gets a dressing-down in the book for being crude of both speech and temperament. But no such dressing-down occurs in the movie, because Mrs Jennings, annoying though she is, plays a key role in keeping various romantic affairs moving along.

So why do we now value forthrightness more than Austen did? I would suggest that it is because we are a more mobile society. Austen catches English society at a tipping point, where industrialization is leading to new wealth, and increased societal geographic mobility. In societies where no-one moves around or up (or down) everyone knows the rules, and everyone knows who the trustworthy people are and who they aren't. So not much needs to be said, and it probably shouldn't be said, because you wouldn't want to hack off someone who you'll have to spend the rest of your life living within a mile of . But, when some handsome stranger comes to town how do you know whether he's an Edward Ferrars or a Willoughby? Nowadays Marrianne would just google Willoughby and that would be that. But in this case she (almost fatally) trusts her instincts that he is good, and therein lies a large part of her problem.

Of course, I was never a big Marrianne fan. As Talinn said "Good Lord, how much of this movie will she spend wallowing". And when I first saw it I made the stupid mistake of thinking Emma Thompson was a great actress and Kate Winslet a poor one because I sympathized much more with Thompson's role. But, Thompson gave herself all the best lines, and she is, in some ways, very actor-ly in her portrayal of Elinor. Winslet, on the other hand, does a fantastic job of conveying Marrianne's wide-eyed romanticism. And she shows us how certain Marrianne is certain of her moral rectitude. She is, in other words, very much a teenager. There is no way Emma Thompson is playing a teenager. Elinor is wise for 19 in the book, but in this movie she's so astute and world-careful she has to be at least 29.

But Winslet's portrayal of teenage angst (matched, if I remember correctly, by a similar turn as Ophelia in Branagh's Hamlet) is terrific. Come to think of it, I didn't rate her in Titanic either. But maybe her Rose was spot on. After all, the fact I was so annoyed by Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is to Winslet's credit, not her detriment.