_Sense and Sensibility_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs The holiday season traditionally brings with it movies which are at once serious and splashy, Oscar contenders and crowd pleasers. Opening this week are two colorful, much-anticipated romances. The first is Emma Thompson's engaging adaptation of Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, directed by Ang Lee (_The Wedding Banquet_, _Eat Drink Man Woman_) and starring Thompson and Hugh Grant. The film's release is fortuitously timed to coincide with much press attention to the Austen Boom. _The New York Times_, in 10 December's "Week in Review'' section, suggests that the current spate of projects - including Amy Heckerling's clever _Clueless_ (based on _Emma_), a BBC version of _Persuasion_ (released this fall), the BBC's upcoming _Pride and Prejudice_, and three more _Emma_s - fits a contemporary pattern of moral self-examination, citing William Bennett as another trendy example. The new _Vanity Fair_ (January 1996) asserts that the new Austen movies reflect the fashionable notion that "knowledge is power.'' Such discussions of Austen's relevance for today's audiences take a kind of high road, explaining that her characters reside in a world fueled by a paradoxical mix of gossip and good manners. Taking another tack, the 15 December issue of _Entertainment Weekly_ features a sidebar story on how Thompson came to write her script, over five years, encouraged by producer Lindsay Doran. In the accompanying photo, Thompson appears wrapped only in toilet paper, lying on the floor of a posh, marbled bathroom. What this image has to do with Austen, the travails of screenwriting, or Thompson's concern over the dearth of big-screen roles for women, might seem at first glance, ambiguous. But it does allude, in its way, to Austen's penchant for provocative social satire. Consider that her romances, as proper as they seem on the surface, have long been admired for their ironic commentary on the inequities of upper-crust culture and rigid gender roles. Her central characters, usually women, typically travel from ignorance to self-consciousness, their journeys posing some pithy lessons for the rest of us. In _S&S_, the protagonists are the Dashwood sisters, the thoughtful and repressed Elinor (Thompson) and the poetic and risk-taking Marianne (Kate Winslet, last seen as the upper-class blond murderess in _Heavenly Creatures_). When their father dies and leaves them, a younger sister, and their mother (Gemma Jones) without much in the way of funds, the family is forced to move to a large and imposing "cottage" on a relative's estate. To illustrate further their different personalities, the women are drawn to very different men. Elinor likes the very polite and confused Edward (Hugh Grant, whom we've seen quite enough of this year, and always playing the same part... actually, Grant and Thompson both seem to be playing the same part, stammering and shrugging, always sweet, never imposing). Marianne, on the other (sensibility) hand, is smitten in a grand style, when she turns her ankle during a rainstorm and is rescued by the dashing Willoughby (Greg Wise), who literally enters on a white horse. The ensuing plot consists of errors in etiquette and embarrassments, as the women discover that the men have less than perfect pasts. As they sort out these conflicts, the ladies are assisted by the impeccably well-behaved Colonel Brandon. As played by Alan Rickman, Brandon rather remarkably embodies the film's crucial paradox, that curbed conduct can be as thrilling as any magnificent gesture. Rickman's small moves, his lowered eyes, his slight grimaces, are often quite breathtaking. _S&S_ is, eventually and inevitably, less about women's freedom from social constraints than about the ways they find to survive inside of them, with dignity which is always informed, for Austen, by irony. What's disappointing is that this temperate, polite repression is standing in for the "best" of women's roles in the '90s. I'm still wondering what that toilet paper pose is about, though. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.