Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
I Screen I I GILT BY ASSOCIATION TAKING THINGS I.ZERAI J.Y A ND BESIDES, Leon Edel is deceiving himself. In my last column, I was trying to undermine the authority with iwhich Edel seems to...
...If only we too could spend all our time, the film seems to say, worrying about such fine moral points and subtle shades of emotion...
...It replaces complexity with a kind of vacuity...
...James never finds his characters quaint...
...In the absence of such irony, the movie offers us the one thing Jan~.es's writing never encourages, nostalgia for the good old days...
...The movie acts as a neutral medium for a remembrance of the novel...
...This is not the spirit of Ivory's film...
...In the film, Lizzie seems to have more this sort of character...
...In my last column, I was trying to undermine the authority with iwhich Edel seems to speak when he praises the current film adaptation of Henry James's The Europeans...
...He seems to think they were onto something he Would also have liked to experience...
...Here again, the film gets James backwards...
...Otherwise, we are left with the impression that James's great heroine is some kind of bewitching nonentity...
...Eugenia's character is one of the places where, as I was saying in my previous column, the films adapts the novel by stripping away its Jamesian qualities...
...This study describes all aspects of Santa Clara's colorful past--from abortive attempts to finance the college by making wine to the I96o's controversy over the admission of women--providing a fascinating case study of Catholic higher education over the past century...
...A consequence is that the film sympathizes with the American characters in a way that the novel does not...
...If you bring to the movie an intense and vivid experience of James's own Writing, that experience easily overrides the movie itself...
...Aping the precept for art that it should hold a mirror up to nature, Ivory's film holds a mirror np to James's novel...
...We are tacitly expected to find these people and their society and even their problems wonderful, because the problems are so much less vexing than those we have today...
...Kristin Gdffith, long-faced and freckled, is by nineteenth-century standards unattractive, but in the film she has been endowed with a sensible mind that compensates for her physical appearance...
...In soliciting Leon Edel's endorsement of their movie, the one claim Ivory and Jhabvala have made for it is the faithfulness to the novel...
...His writing has the apocalyptic quality of St...
...Because the movie has this effect on anybody who is steeped in James, I think Edel deceives himself that somehow the film can represent the novel for the rest of us as well...
...In order to give Eugenia some power equivalent to that she has in the novel, Ivory simply lets his camera gaze into Lee Remick's startling eyes at certain points...
...On a movie screen, this does indeed make Eugenia a rivetting presence...
...She is not a pretty woman--in fact, a couple of characters The University of Santa Clara A H i s t o r y , i 8 5 i - i 9 7 7 Gerald McKevitt, S.J...
...This partisan irony is at work from the very beginning of the novel, where an inn that is "gloomylooking" in one line is "the best hotel in the ancient city of Boston" a few lines further on...
...One might assume the author's discerning thoughts on art, literature, religion (he is a profound Christian) and sex might make the chorus sound cheap by contrast, but they do not...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Yet they alter James considerably, as Mr...
...And like all mirrors, it gets everyth!ng backwards...
...In the novel, Eugenia has great presence...
...In Jhabvala's screenplay- Lizzie is a more prominent character than in lames's novel, where she remains indistinct and rather bland...
...Working by simplification itself, the film seems to favor the moral simplicity of the New Englanders...
...Founded in x 851 as a Jesuit college, the University of Santa Clara became California's first institution of higher learning...
...Lizzie's role has been built up this way in order to provide an adversary for Eugenia and a sounding board for Robert's misgivings about her, which are revealed in the novel through the device films don't have of eavesdropping on someone's thoughts...
...A Voice from the Chorus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux $I0, 352 pp...
...In it the'relations between the characters do have a certain quaintness to them...
...But it is on precisely those grounds that the movie falls...
...But it also alters the person in the novel...
...If a movie doesn't transform adapted material on purpos e , it will do so by chance, and badly...
...The "voice" is Sinyavsky's, sometimes in the form of portions of his letters to his wife, inte/' spersed in the chorus...
...Most of the changes that director lames Ivory and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have made inThe Europeans seem to be of the fussy sort...
...He makes fis admit to the existence of feeling in an age which prides itself on decorum and concealment...
...It makes someone who is morally ambiguous in the novel into someone who is merely inscrutable...
...His sympathies are 9 implied in the novel by that discrete irony which is the pinnacle of his writing style...
...At worst they are supposed to be taken as the changes to which any filmmaker would have to resort in order to tell the novel's story...
...The precedent Tom Jones set remains in effect in The Europeans...
...Tom Jones was released during the height of the Kennedy era, when we first began to realize that all was not right with bur world...
...by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) will undoubtedly remain one of my favorites for a long time...
...The Europeans offers us the worst of both worlds, not a world better than our own...
...In seeing it this way, James assumes the dissatisfied attitude of his heroine, and he invites us to do likewise...
...Lizzie is the sister of Robert Acton (Robin Ellis), a wealthy bachelor on whom Eugenia has designs...
...Not at all the testimony of an embittered Commonweal: 692...
...If we know Eugenia from the novel, Ivory's strategy allows us to impose her on the tabula rasa of 9 Ms...
...Movies that have this patronizing, curiously smug attitude toward classic fiction seem to have come into being with the movie of Tom Jones...
...I9.5o Stanford University Press 7 December 1979:691remark to themselves on her ugliness--but by her independence and the force of her personality, she is always the center of attention...
...Ivory's version of The Europeans removes Eugenia's inner conflicts the way furniture might be removed from a room...
...One reversal which occurs, for instance, is between the characters of the Baroness Eugenia (Lee Remick) and Lizzie Acton (Kristin Griffith...
...The movie was a huge commercial success because it happened to satisfy a new desire to excuse the failure of the present by seeing the past as easier, simpler, more limited...
...Since Edel is one of our leading lames scholars, his approval has clout...
...Illus...
...If Edel imagines that the film is going to increase appreciation of James, he is mistaken...
...Sinyavsky especially loved the Christian sectarians in his prison, the Pentecostals and Old Believers...
...The "chorus" in his title are the snatches of conversation, epithets, curses and ellipI tical outbursts that came from his fellow prisoners during the years he lived with them in the crowded barracks of a forced labor camp in the USSR...
...It seems to be that ultimate compliment which movies can pay to literature: a literal adaptation...
...Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES I I I I I Harvey Cox I II T OWARD the end of some years in the past I might have been hard put to name the single best book I had read all that year...
...The juxtaposition gives the whole book a fleshy, meat-and potatoes realism that makes its spiritual quality even more luminescent...
...Others have had to be cut...
...The proportions of certain roles have been altered...
...Apparently throughout his imprisonment Sinyavsky carried a copy of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament in his boot...
...This year there is no doubt whatever...
...Edel would notice were he to pay more attention to the movieper se...
...They have made that the sole standard by which they want the movie judged...
...John's visions on Patmos presented with the.sweat and grime that must have ground its way into the pages before his release...
...Eugenia, on the other hand, is very beautiful in the movie since she is played by Lee Remick...
...But much of the character James gave her has disappeared...
...There's a Catch-22 in his esteem for the film, for it presupposes familiarity with the literature the film would transmit...
...By trying to be deferential, the film vitiates James, and it vitiates film art as well...
...It is fitting...
...Remick's performance...
...He takes their feelings seriously...
...But in the process, Lizzie takes on Eugenia's character...
...But I suspect that what Edel really likes the movie for is its weakness...
...These are just, as the novel's own heroine might say in a teasing tone, "peccadillos...
...But there really is no such thing as a literal adaptation, for the mere difference in the two media changes whatever is adapted...
...One scene has been added (a ball...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 22
