WHAT A glorious time is had by all in this wonderful adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, "Sense and Sensibility."

The audience has the best time of it. From the opening moments of this movie, we are given permission to relax. Unlike so many other movies of literary provenance, it is clear from the start that this one is going to be entertainment, not homework. Chinese director Ang Lee serves up this sweetmeat without fuss, without the super-seriousness of filmmakers awed by their literary material. Emma Thompson has adapted the novel to include all the Austenesque humor and some of the Thompsonesque variety as well.

She's written herself a wonderful part, too: Elinor Dashwood has all the virtues and flaws of a well-bred young English woman of the late 18th century. She is courteous, compassionate, articulate, loyal and well-read. She is also self-effacing, retiring and thoroughly supportive of the rules and restrictions under which proper social intercourse is conducted.

She is the eldest daughter of a wealthy family faced with the prospect of dramatic economizing when her father's death causes their money, home and possessions to fall to an older half-brother from her father's previous marriage. By law, property passes only from father to son. Elinor and her mother (Gemma Jones) and sisters Marianne (Kate Winslet) and Margaret (Emile Francois) are sent in severely reduced circumstances to live in a cottage in the country.

Prior to their exile, Elinor's half-brother's snobbish wife, Fanny (Harriet Walter) inadvertently sparks a passion between her mild younger brother Edward (Hugh Grant) and Elinor. Edward, visiting from London, is as unlike his grasping sister as a fellow could be. But before he can profess his love to Elinor, he is ordered back to London by the scheming Fanny, who, through her husband, has snatched Elinor's inheritence and now disdains Elinor as a wife for her brother because she is poor.

Marrying off daughters is a major preoccupation of Austen's novels. Engagements are triumphs in battle. Marriages are victories against that dastardly foe spinsterhood, like winning the war. Chaperones closely observe all behavior between young single men and women for any signs of potential marital compatibility. Engagements are plotted before either of the marriageable parties have felt a hint of elevated hormonal activity. Passion be damned - if the bank accounts and breeding match up, send out the invitations.

Elinor pines for the mysteriously absent Edward, but she has learned to hide her emotions, which irritates her spirited younger sister Marianne, a great believer in open demonstration of feelings. Settled in their new cottage, the family meets Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), an unflamboyant middle-aged man of means who is stricken like a flu victim with immediate love for the beautiful Marianne. Marianne, true to her principles, shows her distaste for Brandon with an honesty verging on rudeness.

Add Brandon to the pining abandoned lovers when the handsome young Willoughby (Greg Wise) chances on Marianne and through a whirlwind courtship, leads her to believe he will marry her. He, too, disappears to London. Marianne joins the piners.

Elizabeth Spriggs plays the ebullient Mrs. Jennings, the busybody in-law who contrives a trip to London to cheer everyone up, hoping she will reunite Elinor and Marianne with their true loves. All does not work out as planned, but Lee and Thompson create a world so believable in its absurd rigidity that we feel we have known these characters all our lives. We are unshakably interested in everything that happens to them. The movie is so intelligently wrought, and so full of good spirit that even those who have behaved badly are at the end given the chance to seem human and pained by their own weaknesses.

There isn't a feeble performance in the movie. Grant is as stuttery and awkward as always, but in this case his bumbling handsomeness works. He is the quintessential good man with a spongy spine, no doubt attracted to Elinor's strength.

Thompson wears a distressing frown throughout most of the picture, portraying a woman struggling to keep her unseemly emotions in check. (She looks, as she often does, like Julie Andrews in a state of high disapproval.) Elinor would never think of making anyone uncomfortable by subjecting them to her unhappiness. When she finally receives some good news at the end of the film, she lets loose a Niagara of uncontrollable tears, half filled with the sadness she has not allowed herself to express for so long and half a demonstrating joy. It's a strikingly perfect moment in acting.

Movie Review

"Sense and Sensibility'

* CAST Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Greg Wise


* WRITER Emma Thompson, from Jane Austen's novel