Sense and Sensibility (film) - Reception

Reception

The film received an average review score of 98 percent according to review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which summarised that "Sense and Sensibility is an uncommonly deft, very funny Jane Austen adaptation, marked by Emma Thompson's finely tuned performance." In her work Jane Austen on film and television: a critical study of the adaptations, Sue Parrill praised the 1995 film, writing that with "a sterling screenplay, a high-powered cast, a talented director, and a delightful soundtrack, this film is a winner in all respects." Film critic John Simon gave praise to most of the film and in particular Thompson's performance, though he criticised Grant for being "much too adorably bumbling... he urgently needs to chasten his onscreen persona, and stop hunching his shoulders like a dromedary."

In a positive review, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle lauded the film for containing a sense of urgency "that keeps the pedestrian problems of an unremarkable 18th century family immediate and personal." LaSalle concluded that the adaptation has a "right balance of irony and warmth. The result is a film of great understanding and emotional clarity, filmed with an elegance that never calls attention to itself." Writing for Variety magazine, Todd McCarthy observed that the film's success was assisted by its "highly skilled cast of actors" as well as its choice of Lee as director. McCarthy clarified, "Although previously revealed talents for dramatizing conflicting social and generational traditions will no doubt be noted, Lee's achievement here with such foreign material is simply well beyond what anyone could have expected and may well be posited as the cinematic equivalent of Kazuo Ishiguro writing The Remains of the Day."

In 2008, The Independent ranked it as the third best Austen adaptation of all time, opining that Lee "offered an acute outsider's insight into Austen in this compelling 1995 interpretation of the book Emma Thompson delivered a charming turn as the older, wiser, Dashwood sister, Elinor." Wendy S. Jones, author of Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, And The English Novel, praised Thompson for her fidelity to the source material, referring to the film as "one of the most authentic" of the adaptations of the 1990s.