KISSING COUSINS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

VERY MOVING. THE HEARTBREAK beneath the courtesies." So writes Emma Thompson in the production diary she has just published, together with her screenplay for Sense and Sensibility. Clever girl. For writing this impeccable adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. For giving it a still, deep center with her delicately repressed (and then superbly released) performance in one of the title roles--she's "Sense," otherwise known as Elinor Dashwood. For defining in seven words the essence of romantic comedy. And for understanding that well over a century before it became a movie genre, Austen had mastered its most basic conventions.

These include bringing handsome people--some of them silly, some of them wise, some of them rich, some of them poor--together in a variety of pleasing settings, arranging many misunderstandings and misalliances, equally productive of amusing conversations and embarrassing situations, then sorting everyone and everything out in the last chapter or act. It's a formula amply on display not only in Sense and Sensibility but also in Hollywood's major romantic offering of the Christmas season, Sabrina.

It's not as easy as it looks. The problem for the writer is to balance a wit that doesn't dry the piece out against sentiments that don't turn it soggy. For the actors it lies in playing highly stylized dialogue while remaining in touch with recognizable human nature. For the director, energy is the issue: too much of it and everyone goes bucketing off in the direction of farce; too little of it and the audience starts admiring the scenery. Or, to put the whole tricky business simply, everyone has to stay grounded in reality while at the same time subtly improving on it.

You can measure the accomplishment of Sense and Sensibility simply by observing that it meets all these contradictory standards. It does so while presenting us with a vast range of richly developed, gorgeously played characters ("Can everyone in England act?" Thompson reports director Ang Lee asking after one particularly fruitful casting session) and moving them gracefully through time and a lot of very pretty spaces without ever losing its conviction, its concentration or our bedazzled attention.

Consider what dear Ms. Thompson's dear Miss Dashwood has to deal with. She is in unrequited love with Mr. Ferrars (Hugh Grant, marvelously blending probity and arrested development), who has foolishly promised himself to another. But of this misery she dare not speak, for other circumstances require that she be a brick: the death of her father and the loss of Norland, the stately digs where she and her all female family have been safe and content; the genteel but palpable anxiety of her mother (Gemma Jones), trying to be brave as poverty and spinsterhood loom for her girls; the hysterically misplaced passion of her sister Marianne (Kate Winslet)--the "Sensibility" of the title--nearly dying when that cad John Willoughby (Greg Wise) leaves her for a woman better endowed financially; the romantic occlusion that prevents Marianne from seeing what everyone else can see, that the good Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), despite a certain stiffness in his emotional joints, is her savior.

This is a lot of chaos for one provincial "control freak" (as Thompson describes her) to manage, and it's only natural that she submerge her interests while dealing with the muddle. Yet, by some patient alchemy, Thompson manages to hold our sympathetic concern despite her self-effacement. Precisely because of her witty, held-back playing, she finally achieves one of those privileged moments we are always hoping to find at the movies and so rarely do.

It occurs at the very last moment, when, suddenly, Mr. Ferrars appears at the remote cottage, located just this side of destitution, where the Dashwood ladies have taken refuge. Miraculously he is free of his entanglements, free at last to diffidently declare his love for Elinor. Whereupon she bursts into tears--not just tears but great, teacup-rattling sobs, a huge, whooshing release of long-suppressed emotions, both hers and ours. You feel like crying right along with her. You feel like laughing too. Mostly, though, you feel terrific, in touch with something authentic inside yourself.

This kind of joyous catharsis is what the old movie masters of romantic comedy--Frank Capra, Leo McCarey--sometimes delivered. You don't expect to find it in adaptations of classic literature. You don't expect to find it in modern movies. You certainly wonder how a Taiwan-born director like Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) has managed to reach across time and cultures to deliver these delicate goods undamaged. Maybe some of that whoosh of delight one feels at the end of Sense and Sensibility is for him, and his emergence as a world-class director.

One has to wonder: Did Sydney Pollack feel a different kind of whoosh--something like the sound of wind being removed from sails--when he first beheld Sense and Sensibility? Pollack is its executive producer, without whose enthusiasm, it is said, the movie might never have been made. He is one of the few contemporary American directors blessed with a genuinely romantic spirit (Out of Africa) and no small gift for comedy (Tootsie). He is also, by quirk of fate, Lee's chief competitor in the romantic-comedy market niche this season, as the producer-director of Sabrina.

This property also has a history: as a successful Broadway play, then as a Billy Wilder movie starring three beloved figures, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. And, as you'll recall, it has a nice little story to tell too. It's the one about the chauffeur's daughter (Julia Ormond), living over the garage on a vast Long Island estate, in love since childhood with David (Greg Kinnear), the playboy living up the driveway. When she grows up and he notices her, that threatens his engagement, which in turn threatens the merger of two family firms that Linus (Harrison Ford), his older brother and a grumpy workaholic, has been nurturing. The latter sets out to seduce Sabrina for purely business purposes and ends up himself seduced by this wise child.

It ought to work as well now as it did in the '50s; Cinderella stories don't date any more than Jane Austen stories do. And the new acting team isn't half bad. Ford's muttering misanthropy may actually be funnier than Bogart's harder, more sardonic take on Linus. Ormond is no Audrey Hepburn, but Hepburn was sui generis, and Ormond does have a shy charm all her own. And there is a wastrely weakness about Kinnear's good looks that suits David more neatly than Holden's square-cut handsomeness did.

But in updating the script, Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel have too often substituted topical one-liners (some of them quite funny) for well-joined badinage. This has a distancing effect. Even worse, someone made a disastrous decision to lengthen the early sequence in which Sabrina finds herself in Paris. Wilder got through her maturation at montage speed; Pollack lingers over it for 20 inconsequential minutes, a bring-down from which the movie never quite recovers.

And so it goes. Pollack and his team have cast good actors (John Wood, Nancy Marchand) in the supporting roles but have, at best, provided turns for them to do rather than parts for them to play. They have hired expensive locations, which are supposed to impart authenticity to the film but which begin to look like overconsidered stage sets. We remain outside the fourth wall looking in but are never drawn in; bemused perhaps, even agreeably complaisant, but never entirely amused.

In other words, they have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated--but nothing on the grand scale of Thompson's great blowout.