Jane Austen's sillier characters

When your wife is pregnant, movie date nights involves very mild films. This is because pregnancy tends to heighten a woman's emotions, and any film where anything truly bad happens to anyone, particularly if violence is involved, will cause your wife, your unborn child and you not to sleep through the night. This is especially true if, say, an innocent vegetable is hacked to pieces with a kitchen knife and thrown into a salad. A few weeks ago, deciding that HBO's John Adam's miniseries is too violent, we flipped through the channels in search of an alternative. Fortunately, the Disney Channel was showing Aladdin, and the giant-snake cartoon violence at the end was too unrealistic to be a threat.

Last night, instead of risking a non-family friendly rental, we broke out our copy of Sense and Sensibility, the most tolerable Jane Austen film for us men. In Jane Austen films (I'm using this for short-hand - I know Austen wrote the books and that directors and writers, in this case Ang Le and Emma Thompson, adapted it to the screen), the main characters are well developed and multifaceted, but many of the side characters, particularly the comically unpleasant ones, are very one dimmensional. I cannot speak for the books, have never read them (nor do I intend to), of course. The background characters are fools or gossips or greedy villains with no or few redeeming qualities to see, and watching Sense and Sensibility play off all of these familiar characteristics reminded me how easy it is to take the shallow view of someone in the real world.

One particularly despicable character reminded me of an acquaintance, and I was tempted to dismiss this person in my mind again due to the more awful characteristics. I know that there is more to this person, more than a cartoon sketch makes for comfortable categorization. Austen's work put to film would be too tedious if these characters were given more three-dimensional personalities. Of course, I can see myself in the cowardice and indecisiveness of many of Austen's men (though they are fleshed out in more redeeming ways). But it's good to be reminded that our loose characterizations of others - in our art, in our jokes, in our thoughts - don't show the full picture. How easy it would be for those who don't have the time or the space to get to know me assume my quirks, idiosyncrasies and, to put it bluntly, sins, paint the whole picture.