The Jane Austen A/V Club: Sense and Sensibility (Day Ten)

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is a throwback to my youth. I owned the movie, Sense and Sensibility, on VHS (a.k.a. stole it from my mother) and got lost numerous times in the cinematography and direction. 

Sense and Sensibility "is a 1995 British-American period drama film directed by Ang Lee and based on Jane Austen's 1811 novel of the same name. Actress Emma Thompson wrote the script and stars as Elinor Dashwood, while Kate Winslet plays Elinor's younger sister Marianne." In addition, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman play their respective suitors. 

Anyone familiar with Austen's work can gather the focal point of storyline: Money and Marriage. "[T]he Dashwood sisters – though they are members of a wealthy English family of landed gentry, circumstances result in their sudden destitution, forcing them to seek financial security through marriage." 

And for the non-reading movie-going public, the film deviates from the book in a few ways "Thompson's screenplay exaggerated the Dashwood family wealth to make their later scenes of poverty more apparent to modern audiences. It also altered the traits of the male leads to make them more appealing to contemporary viewers."

Sense and Sensibility "garnered seven nominations at the 68th Academy Awards ceremony, where Thompson received the Award for Best Adapted Screenplay,^[160] making her the only person to have won an Oscar for both her writing and acting (Thompson won the Best Actress award for Howards End, in 1993)."