The Portrait of a Lady

...James's heroine is actively seeking to fulfill her destiny when she marries Gilbert and, in her gen-erosity, she endows him with the money he needs to fulfill himself...

...How-ever, by the end of the movie, those ends take their toll on the material...

...No more...

...Hated the por-trait...

...Staging Isa-bel's tour of the Near East as a silent movie travelogue comes across as un-funny camp...

...Campion honorably works to realize the drama of the novel even as she shapes it to her own ends...

...Lawrence's, a powerful, healthy sexuality is the con-comitant of abiding love and mental health...

...But Gilbert doesn't push or punch...

...Migraine when she is erotically daydreaming, when she is weighing moral considerations, when she is being kissed, when she is con-templating a bit of dessert...

...Oh blessed dinosaur, Henry James...

...But then the marriage leads her into dark moral ter-ritory, and she is nearly overcome by doubts, qualms, even despair...

...Here we come to the nub of the movie and why it's a refutation of James even as it adapts his tale with considerable skill...

...Jane Campion may be known as a fem-inist but she is above all a Lawrentian (see Commonweal, January 14,1996...

...The plot isn't dumbed down but merely trimmed for dramatic litheness...

...That close-up is worth a thousand Jamesian words...

...The line's author is James, not Jones...

...Buy why did Campion not only allow this performance but abet it with an Elsa Lanchester/Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, blue-green filters on the camera, and almost no variation in the delivery of dialogue...

...Christian Bales is de-lightfully ardent and silly as Pansy's suitor, the silliness undercutting the ar-dency, the ardency mitigating the silli-ness...

...That the "silent" movie has dialogue makes it doubly anachronistic...

...In Henry James's novel, honor, not sexual fulfillment or even true love, is the highest attainment...

...but Jones had the wit to leave it in...

...But to watch a delayed adolescent get nervier and nervier for 150 minutes can be a bore...

...That's not an insult, just a de-scription...

...But in its final twen-ty minutes-several scenes of tense talk-ing heads making revelations to one another-I finally learned what I did not wish to learn: that I could not care what happened to Nicole Kidman's, or Jane Campion's, Isabel Archer...

...Valentina Cervi, fetchingly can-did, maddeningly placid...

...But Campion evidently had such trou-ble accounting for Isabel's self-destruc-tive choice of husband that she felt obliged to turn the tremulous but strong young woman into a neurotic suffering from delayed adolescence...

...But, more often, the director's visual solutions work, and I loved the way the close-ups and two-shots (photography by Stuart Dryburgh) seem to float up out of the haze of cafes and parlors as if the buzzing world were being shut out while we eavesdropped on these inti-mately conversing souls...

...She is her fa-ther's daughter and will obey him...

...This is a sublime exalta-tion of the adage, "You made your bed, now lie in it...

...Gilbert's assault on his wife for her supposed treachery, strictly ver-bal in the book, is here physically vio-lent, but it's the right degree of violence: no split lips or black eyes, but Gilbert lift-ing Isabel like a sulky child onto piled cushions, followed by smacking her hands (Daddy knows best...

...Greater abuse follows and Isabel is sent sprawl-ing to the floor...

...Kidman, from start to finish, looks as if she were suffering from mi-graine...

...She also knows when to leave well enough alone...

...One memorable instance: Gilbert's daughter Pansy smiles warmly, even encourag-ingly, as an impecunious lover pleads his cause at a ball, but a close-up shows us that the girl's hands are treating the silver tea service with as much solicitude as her lover's feelings...

...The quality of the acting ranges wild-ly...

...A modern artist if there ever was one, Jane Campion knows that nobody nowadays lies in the bed he or she has made but hies to Reno and strips the bed...

...But there are also lapses...

...The fastidious brutality of the man is in that maneuver...

...The scenarist makes a mostly shrewd selection of those scenes that carry the main action...

...he simply steps on the hem of her skirt...

...An American heiress of the 1870s, Isabel Archer, embarks on a voyage of self-discovery in Europe...

...I once con-sidered Kidman an adequate lightweight actress...

...Loved the frame...

...The novel isn't jazzed up or sent up...

...Isabel's greeting to a suitor, "I can't tell you how I hoped you wouldn't come," is the greatest courtship quencher since Elizabeth Bennet told off Darcy in Pride and Prejudice...

...The film is done with such art that it keeps boredom at arm's length for most of its running time...

...Campion has mounted most of the script with panache and point...

...Her final return to Gilbert isn't motivated by her hopes of winning back his love...

...Late in the film, when the disenchant-ed Isabel enters her husband's Roman mansion, the doors clang behind her like prison gates...

...It is the handsome American suitor Goodwood whom Campion has plainly designated as Isabel's true bed-and soulmate...

...In the supporting cast, three performances are perfect: John Gielgud's brief turn is winter sunlight...

...In some ways Campion's dreamy, sub-aqueous style is a good equivalent of James's prose, though she lacks his dead-pan sarcasm...

...In her world, as in D.H...

...Isabel's surrender to Gilbert is a form of perversion...

...The nature of Gil-bert's tie to Madam Merle is made explicit but not by exposed flesh or heads dent-ing a pillow...

...And now we come to the big headache of the movie: Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer...

...John Malkovich's Gilbert may be too unrelievedly saturnine, yet critic Stanley Kauffman was right to note that Malkovich captures Gilbert's "almost disinterested viciousness...

...The invalid Ralph Touchette can certainly love but is on his way to the boneyard...

...But it's a generous refutation which, on the whole, plays fair with the material...

...To see a strong woman founder, then pull herself free of a moral morass, is dramatic...

...That is why she changes the ending to offer Isabel a chance to find romantic fulfillment...

...The script by Laura Jones is a model of concise faithfulness...

...The most praised performance, Barbara Hershey's Madam Merle, seemed to me a thing of sufficient sexual glamour somewhat marred by unincisive diction...

...And Pansy herself is miraculously realized by a new face (and what a face...

...The film's relatively overt violence and sexuality will put off strict Jamesians, but I felt that Campion employed just the right dosage of sensation in particular instances to elucidate the quality of a per-son or relationship...

...She adroitly links them with her own (minor) inven-tions, and tactfully clips James's luxuri-ant dialogues just enough to make them playable...

...Any actor who can come close to wrecking an entire movie strictly with the force of her glumness is a major talent, a heavyweight drag...

...Sixty-odd scenes of migraine, 150 minutes of migraine...

...Thanks, we get the point...

...After Ralph's funeral, Isabel must confront another of her for-mer beaux and decide whether or not to return to Gilbert...

...Rejecting two eminently worthy suit-ors, she marries the ultra-refined Gilbert Osmond, discovers him to be a fortune hunter, honorably thwarts his plan to marry off his daughter (by a previous marriage) to the British lord who was once Isabel's own suitor, and further en-rages her spouse by speeding to the bed-side of a man he despises, her soulmate Ralph Touchett...

...And with this I do have a quarrel...

...It's a re-turn to honor because the marriage into which she deliberately entered is where her honor lies...

...I have no aesthetic quarrel with this...