So this is a movie from the Great Austen Boom of the mid-’90s, and as Austen movies go, it’s… okay. It’s not as purely sappy as Emma or as craftsy as Sense and Sensibility or as narratively full as Pride and Prejudice, but it’s not like some cheeseball BBC thing, either, so. Its plot is hampered by the fact that it’s a romance wherein the heroine speaks — and I think this is literally true — no more than three words to the hero over the entire course of the movie. I can understand that it’s occasionally necessary to push subplots off-screen, but treating the entire central romance in that way rather saps a certain narrative momentum from the thing.

If the movie were a wine, it’d be an inoffensive pinot grigio (which is, coincidentally, the wine we drank while watching it).