2 REVIEWS. WICKER & SENSE and SENSIBILITY: What's Love Got To Do With It?

Be careful what you wish for.

What you get might be fraught with untold complications... or satisfying beyond your wildest dreams. Maybe a little bit of both.

Such is the case with Wicker, a fabulously romantic collaboration from real-life married couple Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who serve as co-writers and directors. Adapted from Ursula Wills's short story, "The Wicker Husband," Wicker tells the story of an unnamed Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman), an "ugly girl" shunned by locals who commissions the village Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband out of wicker.

The resulting creation, in the form of Alexander Skarsgård, is spectacular beyond the Fisherwoman's wildest dreams, arousing within her feelings and fantasies she never thought possible. Consequently, the Wicker Husband's appearance also riles up intense jealousy among the villagers, threatening to destroy the very fiber of its tiny community.

I won't divulge any specific spoilers as Wicker is a movie that must be experienced, savored and discussed afterward. There's a lot going on and Fischer and Wilson make the most of time and efficiency bringing their story to the big screen. Wicker is kind of a mash-up - part Pygmalion, part The Ugle Duckling, part Beauty and the Beast - that cleverly examines the nature of true love amidst communal degeneracy. Who deserves to find true love, and what happens when a social outcast (re: the Fisherwoman) discovers the delights of human intimacy? Is it the community's responsibiity to police human behavior?

How the community responds individually and collectively is a study on human nature as its worst, a descent into greed and self-gratification that is driven by ignorance and envy. Elizabeth Debicki is evil incarnate as the Tailor's Wife and self-identified moral compass of the village. Fischer and Wilson have written a beautifully nuanced script that is, alternately, bawdy, wickedly funny and sublimely touching, one that raises questions and offers observations about what drives the human spirit: how community norms often stand in the way of personal fullment and emotional intimacy.

I don't know when I've seen marriage portrayed with such exquisite simplicity and affection. When the Wicker Husband tells his Fisherwoman that he's happy when she's happy, that he has been created for her happiness, you can't help but believe his genuine devotion, especially watching the gentle chemistry between Skarsgård and Colman. I couldn't help thinking about a line from 1994's Four Weddings and Funeral where Simon Callow's character proposes a toast to his friends before they all join a wedding reception: "A toast before we go into battle. True love. In whatever shape or form it may come. May we all in our dotage be proud to say, 'I was adored once too.'"

Indeed. Alexander Skarsgård's Wicker Husband is a testament to spousal loyalty and smittenness, and Colman's Fisherwoman is a study in budding self-actualization. Her face is mesmerizing as we watch her experience sensual pleasures she never imagined, and her deepening affection for the husband she paid the Basket Weaver to make is breathtaking and heartfelt. Somehow, the movie manages to capture joyful eroticism and romantic fantasy all in one brilliantly constructed medieval allegory, set to the narrative musings of Peter Dinklage's melllifluous voice and the changing phases of one glorious moon.

Could this be witchcraft?

Naw. It must have been love.

Wicker is must-see movie making. Don't let the "romantic fantasy" label fool you: there's lots going on here. If you can, try to catch Wicker in a theater to appreciate fully the intricate details that comprise this fantastical fable. I must plan to see it again soon.

Has it been thirty years since Emma Thompson's bold interpretation of Jane Auste n's Sense and Sensibility graced the silver screen? Well, thirty-one, to be exact. Directed by Ang Lee, the 1995 version of Austen's first novel was the third iteration of S&S (the firsit two were BBC TV productions) and, arguably, the best cinematic version: critics calling Thompson's adapted screenplay (for which she won the Oscar) an "uncommonly deft, very funny" Austen adaptation led by a "highly skilled cast of actors," including Thompson, a pre-Titanic Kate Winslet, a post-Four Weddings and a Funeral Hugh Grant, and the always Machiavellian Alan Rickman.

Austen purists were not happy about some of Thompson's alledgedly "wild" deviations from the novel: a then thirty-something Thompson played Elinor, and her script cut scenes and storylines, while adding others, using only "six or seven" lines from the novel. Overall, though, audiences and cinephiles embraced her - and Ang Lee's - late 20th century interpretation of love and manners among late eighteenth century British society.

At the time of the film's release, there was backlash about an Asian director at the helm of a movie based on a beloved English novel, but now his achievements are considered more of a benchmark in Austen adaptations. There have been subsequent "versions" of Sense and Sensibility, including a 2008 mini-series that is probably the closest in capturing the novels subplots and essential themes. So why make another now, how does the newest iteration differ from previous adaptations, and - most importantly - is it worth seeing?

To start, the 2026 Sense and Sensibility is the first version written and directed by women: Diana Reid and Georgia Oakley, respectively, and the focus is clearly on "sisterhood," both literally (among the Dashwood sisters) and figuratively (among other female characters). The tone is low-key, the color palate muted compared to Lee's 1995 vision, the actors lesser known and celebrated. The only element of the film that sometimes feels out-of-sync with the movie's restrained look and feel is Roger Goula's overbearing score: you can anticipate the swelling of strings at every plot turn and moment, which (for me) became almost clichéd and ineffectual by movie's end.

For those who haven't read Austen's novel - or seen one of its many interpretations, Sense and Sensibility follows the lives of Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) Dashwood as they navigate life and love after the sudden death of their father. Victims of inheritance loss (their father's fortune was given - at was practice at the time - to John, an older brother from another wife), they're left with 1/10th the provisions they were anticipating and forced to relocate, along with their mother and younger sister Margaret, to a smaller cottage.

The ever-pragmatic Elinor (sense) and always emotional Marianne (sensibility) learn to negotiate the many nuances that defined British society, class differences, and gender expectations. Along the way, each sister aquires some of the other's dominant trait (Elinor learns to address her feelings; Marianne finds some balance between passion and praticality) with such smoothness, it's almost as though their transformation is inevitable, rather than earned through life experiences.

The men that cross their paths - Elinor's would-be soulmate Edward Ferrars (George McKay) and Marianne's passion princes John Willoughby (Frank Dillane) and Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) - are less fully-fleshed out characters and more "types" that drive the story. Floating around the two sisters's dire financial and uncertain romantic situations, mostly to provide context for and guidance to their futures, are younger sister Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), Mrs. Dashwood (Caitriona Balfe), and an assorted group of well-meaning and/or catty females, including their bitchy, selfish sister-in-law Fanny Dashwood (Stacy Martin) and a very distant cousin and resident busybody called Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw).

It's all very British, very precisely mannered and extremely restrained: we see the camera linger on Elinor and Edward's hands as their fingers almost touch, which is also to say, this new version of Sense and Sensibility runs like a well-timed clock, with each character, each scene carefully placed into the whole of the Dashwood Sisters's quest to secure love and reasonable financial security. In particular, Arnaud Potier's understated color palate serves as its own character, pulling the story together as the camera moves effortlessly between the unbridled beauty of nature and the structural manuevering necessary within the British manor. At two hours, twelve minutes, the film moved apace as one scene segued to another with Grula's lucious score providing the necessary, if often loud, transition from places, emotions, situations.

If you've seen (and loved, as I did) the 1995 version, you're likely to find Oakley's creation less sharp, the wit more subdued. Thompson's Oscar-winning script was intentional in its send-up of the British class system, specifically, equating a good love match with money. That challenge is still present in the new version, though it has less of Thompson's edge and the earlier cast's charisma in pulling it off.

Nonetheless, this strong core led by Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles as the Dashwood sisters drives an equally refined ensemble where no one actor outshines the other, and all become players in Austen's enduringly satirical, if gentle, perspective on British society. It's a good companion piece to its now thirty-year old predecessor, and a fine addition to the Jane Austen movie adaptation list. Sometimes, it's just fun to sit back and rewatch a beloved story with engaging characters, even if you already know the outcome. In this case, the journey was well worth repeating.

Both Wicker and Sense and Sensibility address themes about love: finding it, embracing it, sustaining it. The problem, in both instances, is people in general, and society, in particular: how manners and mores often pose an unfortunate, if unintended, obstacle to true love's path. Too bad, because love is, in the end, all you need.

Cue the Beatles.

*******

Wicker and Sense and Sensibility are currently playing in theaters. Wicker is rated R for adult themes, language, sexual situations and brief nudity. It is not expected to be available on major streaming platforms until January or February 2027. The more modest Sense and Sensibility is rated PG-13 for some scenes of intense passion amidst the British upper class. It is contracted for initial streaming via Peacock, with an extended streaming release following on Netflix. The exact streaming date is still being determined.