Initially, I found myself wishing I hadn't seen Emma Thompson's version before seeing this one. But about the time I started the 4th half-hour installment I realized that it didn't matter. Even without the 1995 film version to compare it to, this version just falls flat. I've been able to watch and enjoy the smaller, TV-mini-series versions of Austen's novels as much (or even more) than their big, film-versions, but this just didn't work. They were slightly more faithful to the novel, but only slightly, and it didn't work in their favor. The acting is just bad. The actors all seemed as if they were reciting from a teleprompter. I liked very much the production of "Mansfield Park" that came out just a couple of years after this, so I know they were capable of doing so much better. At the very least, the actress playing Marianne should have at least pretended to have as much passion as Marianne was supposed to have, but she didn't even try. I couldn't tell one difference between Marianne's character and Elinor's character. But maybe it was the script. The script didn't seem to give her all that much passion to act out. There are other versions out there that I haven't seen, and I hope they do better.
Review of Sense and Sensibility
