The Talkies

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site —http:11www.spectatonorg...

...but, having so delivered with such neatness and finality both truth and beauty to the realm of the merely subjective, why should he bother making other distinctions...

...Not the new, liberal Clint Eastwood, who shows Kevin Spacey getting away with the murder of his rough-trade boyfriend (Jude Law)—with the help of a black drag queen called Lady Chablis —by an appeal to the tolerance of eccentricity for which the charming gentlefolk of Savannah, Georgia, are so far-famed...

...Instead he engages in a clever and delicately-handled adumbration of what amounts to the opposite of Kevin Spacey's simple-minded maxim in Midnight in the Garden...

...Clean them up and give them a decent haircut and, nearly thirty years on, the heroes of Easy Rider will start looking appealing to the good ole boys in the pickup trucks.44 Again and again we are reminded of our own ignorance about what we have just seen...

...So is anyone who makes a movie out of anything that is not a movie already...

...The movie wasn't Shakespeare because Shakespeare didn't make movies...

...This is a particularly serious problem when the reality it depicts is placed at a distance from us in time...

...This judgment is essentially correct...

...And you would be right...

...When the film came out on video, I watched it again with a friend who knew Shakespeare's text almost by heart...

...Everything that my friend said was true except the last thing...

...This question becomes of urgent concern when Nick takes to sleepwalking one night, fills up a bucket with gasoline and throws it all over Al...

...Menand criticizes both movies for their deviations from James's imaginings...

...When Spacey says to the visiting Yankee journalist played by John Cusack that "truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder" he is, strictly speaking, talking nonsense...

...It takes a rare adaptation of something comparatively well-known, such as Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, to remind us of how narrow an imaginative range our fin de siecle cineastes traverse...

...Instead of truth being in the eye of the beholder, the eye of the beholder is shown over and over again to be mistaken in what it supposes to be truth...

...Henry James would have been entertained by that idea, and it should be recommended to John Berendt and Clint Eastwood and all the good people of Savannah...

...Atricky thing for our late-century movie-makers to get around, you might think...

...The tendency of their visual impact upon us is always to "privilege" (as postmodemist critics say) their version of reality almost to the point of annihilating all others...

...Yet even this, like her several self-confessed murders, is not what it seems...

...Washington Square he finds "a little broad" and "not exactly understated"Jamesian, indeed, but "just not what James himself saw in the story...

...As the film went on he became more and more enraged by what he was seeing and commented on every telescoping or re-arrangement, every excision or deviation from the text in the most scathing terms...

...By the end of the movie he was insisting that Nunn had no right to call this hodgepodge of textual odds and ends Shakespeare's Twelfth Night...

...E-mail him at IVBowman@compuserve.com...

...It is a picture full of titillating pathologies, but the use it makes of them is quite unexpected...

...In the end we are grateful for having been deceived—not only because the likable and entirely un-self-pitying Nicole deserves a little happiness but because the discovery that we have been wrong is the only way to confirm that there is such a thing as right...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Lovey Dovey M y more devoted readers may remember the praise I heaped upon Trevor Nunn's film version of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in this space just over a year ago...

...Everything is in the eye of the beholder...

...But Bennett isn't interested in anything like that...

...He wrote plays...

...Nicole ("Nick") Davies (Frances O'Connor) has as a child watched hermother burned alive in front of her eyes by a pedophile of whom she, the mother, appears to have been a rare adult lover, and Nicole herself may have been molested by him...

...It was Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night—and a decidedly inferior Twelfth Night at that...

...Softley's characters in The Wings ofthe Dove are playing the same game with us: no one could believe for a moment that they are anything but late twentieth-century actors dressing up as early twentieth-century people and expecting us to enjoy the imposture as much as they do...

...It is the distinctively contemporary sensibility that says there must have been something a little bit kinky there, and once that voice is allowed to be raised, all the distinctively Jamesian morality that has been left in looks as if it doesn't know what it is doing there...

...At some point, as with Baz Luhrmann's awful Romeo and Juliet, which came out at about the same time, the original author's name ought to be taken off the product...

...17 Who could resist that as a cinematic subject...

...At any rate, having grown up, Nicole has apparently taken it upon herself to wreak a terrible revenge for her childhood trauma upon the whole male sex and has gone with her boyfriend Al (Mat Day) on a trans-Australian crime spree, leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake...

...Thus, I thought, Ang Lee's The Ice Storm undercut its own best effects by making the bleakness of its characters' lives look as if it were obscurely related to the fact that they wore peasant dresses and bell-bottom trousers...

...Just imagine what a combination of voyeuristic thrills and feminist preaching Hollywood would have made out of such material as this...

...John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has probably been read by more people than either The Day of the Jackal or Starship Troopers, but it has the advantage over them (and, of course, Henry James) of being a book of, by and for the 1990's, a brilliant synthesis of Southern Gothic and a hip (or hippie) attitude toward sexual indulgence...

...In this movie, the imagination of Henry There's redeeming virtue in Bill Bennett's Kiss or Kill...

...Such glorying in its own campy chic, even if not a thumb in the eye to Heinlein, would still be an insult to everyone who takes military heroism and political oppression seriously...

...But why doesn't somebody protest that such a compendium of movie fashions—Ruthless Roosians of the fabled Russian mafia, golden-hearted IRA terrorists, incompetent FBI agents, unnecessarily high-tech weaponry, even Bruce Willis's first screen kiss with a man—has been assembled for no other purpose than reflecting our own prejudices back at us...

...We are so used to these qualities that we scarcely notice them anymore...

...But why, if we are willing to allow such license to Agnieszka Holland, do the changes made by Iain Softley (director) and Hossein Amini (writer) in The Wings ofthe Dove—undeniably a pretty movie—seem so much less forgivable...

...I hope that those who followed my advice in the November TAS and went to see Washington Square will agree with me that the "broad" and non-understated elements complained of by Menand were permissible liberties given the filmmaker's need to bring James's largely internal drama out into the light of day...

...04 James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...Even Menand's most serious objection to it, the deferral of the revelation of Morris Townsend's true motives in courting Catherine Sloper until near the end, is I think a useful device for conveying to movie-goers the essential element in the story, not easily made visual, of the self-deception on both sides of that relationship...

...This is the nonsense of our time, and the reason why contemporary audiences are much more likely to be interested in a sexually twisted version of James's Kate Croy than in the real thing...

...Or it would be if anybody bothered to take the movie seriously...

...For the religion of tolerance makes moral assertion look at best like an exercise in nostalgia, and it leaves us with nothing to entertain and nourish the spirit but a connoisseurship of pathology...

...But yet another of the spate of brilliant Australians who have been bubbling up from Down Under in the last few years, one Bill Bennett, has done it in this month's Movie of the Month, called Kiss or Kill...

...The Wings of the Dove Menand sees as a much more radical modernization — essentially an imitation of The English Patient which uses James's story as the backdrop for its sumptuous visual presentations of Edwardian (that is, not Victorian) London and Venice, rather than using the settings as the backdrop for the story...

...How are intimate relationships possible in such circumstances...

...58 January 19 98 • The American Spectator James is reduced to a marketing device, a brand name, for what is essentially nothing but an exercise in the narcissism and self-congratulation that have become the besetting sins of late twentieth-century moviedom...

...It is because, I think, what we value about the "Jamesian" (or Shakespearean) residue that the various cinematic adapters of these authors leave us is a kind of escape from the tyranny of fashion, which is otherwise so unrelenting in its demands upon us...

...The movies are an essentially totalitarian medium, as Leni Riefenstahl was one of the first to recognize...

...Of course, Frederick Forsyth is not so eminent a litterateur as to elicit protests from the likes of Louis Menand when his Day ofthe Jackal— already a pretty good movie—is made into the ludicrously un-Forsythian Jackal starring Bruce Willis and Richard Gere...

...And anyone who makes a movie out of a play is doing to it something scarcely less radical than translating it into another language...

...The moviemaker must be judged not by his faithfulness to his original — an aesthetic chimera if there ever was one—but by his effectiveness as a moviemaker...

...Again and again we are reminded of our own ignorance about what we have just seen as the characters themselves learn not only how little they really know of each other but how little they can be sure of even the little they think they do know...

...but it was the substance of my praise of Nunn's very JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement Shakespearean Twelfth Night that I didn't think he had to do that...

...He means "beauty" rather than "art," presumably, since he is himself a connoisseur...

...And even there, it is only the Heinlein fans who care enough to protest at the violence done to their hero's futuristic political imaginings by Paul Verhoeven — who re-imagines them as a special-effects extravaganza featuring Californian Nazis (including Ober- gruppenfiihrer Doogie Howser) fighting B-movie style monster-bugs in outer space...

...Their discovery of a hitherto unsuspected sexual subtext in the story of Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), who pushes her own suitor, Merton Densher (Linus Roache), upon the dying American heiress, Milly Theale (Allison Elliott) in order to get her money, is to be deplored not so much because it would have been utterly unfamiliar to Henry James as because it is utterly familiar to us...

...The reason is that we have all but forgotten that movies can be anything else...

...I thought of this argument again on reading Louis Menand's discussion in the New York Review ofBooks of the new film versions of two novels by Henry James, Washington Square and The Wings ofthe Dove...

...He stops her before she can torch him, but he has to tie her hands to the bed rail (with her permission) for the rest of the night...

...The American Spectator • January r 9 9 8 59...