After watching "Sense and Sensibility" today, I realized that Marianne and Ruth have similar personalities. They're the kind of girls who don't and haven't thought about controlling their emotions. In their eyes, love should be full of romance and twists and turns, but the more twists and turns, the stronger and more precious the love. At the same time, once they make up their minds to love, they will not look back or change their minds because of better candidates. Unless death separates the two or the other party changes his mind. What moved her was not Colonel Brandon's silent attention, but Willoughby's timely appearance on that injured and heavy rainy day, as well as his mutual love for Shakespeare's poetry; he also painted on the Titanic. Jack walked into her heart with the temperament of a poor artist with big dreams. Marianne gave her disgusting sister-in-law Fanny a face from the very beginning, made no attempt to hide her impatience with the colonel, and never thought about covering up her feelings or playing hard-to-play tactics with Willoughby; Ruth was arguing with her mother. Stiff, dancing and learning to spit in the clutter of third-class cabins. Both characters are crazy about love. Once they are in love, they are like unstoppable galloping horses. Marianne and Ruth are both true believers in love.
So I think Marianne in '95 is probably the best proof to convince the director to choose Kate to play Ruth.
Willoughby quickly succumbed to the prospect of poverty and took a realistic path away from Marianne, while Jack died before he could wait ashore to prove his inexhaustible love for Ruth over the long years to come.
Willoughby is actually a very interesting character. If he was bad to the core, it would be fine if he was a prodigal in love from beginning to end, but he still loved Marianne and even wanted to propose. So not only the director but also the audience can't easily classify him as a bad guy after the incident and turn around to celebrate Marianne and Colonel Brandon's final marriage. Ang Lee gave Willoughby a short shot at the end. He rode a horse and stood on the slope to watch Marianne's wedding from a distance, and then left silently. In the new version, Willoughby can't help but confide in Enori about the pain of being forced to live with a woman she doesn't love. I would guess that the author designed Willoughby to deceive Colonel Brandon's adopted daughter's feelings and abandon her after she became pregnant just to increase Willoughby's evil, otherwise people will put more thought on this character or even Sympathy, after all, life has never been short of examples of giving up roses for bread. If Willoughby and Marianne are together, how can he ensure their lives without financial resources? There will probably be quarrels and disappointments between the two. After all, married life is not just about reciting Shakespeare's poems. Simple and laid back. And if Jack hadn't died, it was also a question of whether they could go on completely.
Someone once commented that "Revolutionary Road" was a follow-up to "Titanic", and I was noncommittal about that. Love often withers in the face of real life, as it was in Austin's time, and it does today. In order to see a beautiful love story, perhaps we have to hope that love believers like Marianne can see the world clearly as soon as possible and remove some illusions and edges. But again, everyone couldn't help but debate whether Marianne was really in love with Brandon in the end, or whether just being a colonel was an appropriate choice.
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