Spiced Up Henry James
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen SPICED UP HENRY JAMES By Raphael Shargel For a while, it seemed that every Merchant-Ivory imitator in England and this country wanted to do a movie from a Jane Austen novel. Now,...
...Into Aunt Maude's circle comes Milly Theale, a young American heiress, the picture of graceful innocence but terminally ill...
...This is important in the novels, but no more so than their intellectual and ethical integrity...
...Throughout the book, she tries desperately to act in communion with Milly and especially Densher, to make them complicit in her plans...
...They become engaged but are too poor to marry...
...Albert Finney, though he shares the movie's best scenes with Judithlvey, who plays his sister, is a sleepy and petulant Doctor Sloper where Ralph Richardson half a century ago was reserved, sarcastic and viciously unwavering...
...his people are extremely well drawn...
...In the novel, penniless Kate Croy falls in love with journalist Merton Densher...
...The films all reduce their protagonists to a sexist cliché: woman as an essentially emotional creature...
...Softley, cinematographer Eduardo Serra and screenwriter Hossein Amini (the last two recently gutted Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure for the screen) keep the basic plot, but drain it of almost all meaning...
...Softley's has proved to be the most successful of the latest crop of James movies, however—albeit only because it is the least ambitious...
...What engages the filmmakers' interest is the intensity of their desires...
...Henry James was obsessed with the inner life...
...Wyler's cast was at the peak of its powers...
...Now, suddenly, Henry James has become the rage...
...Ironically, in an age of feminism all three of the current James films—even though two of them were written and directed by women—depict their heroines primarily in sexual terms...
...His plots are involving and original...
...later, she jumps into bed with her cousin and kisses him fervently...
...It describes the charm of turn-of-the-century European aristocracy, and we are well into the book before we see the hardness and cruelty that lie beneath the shimmering veneer of that class...
...As Milly warms up to both Kate and Densher, Kate, for dark reasons that soon become obvious, begs her fiancé to court the wealthy newcomer...
...In other ways, though, James' novels lend themselves to cinematic treatment...
...Maggie Smith mocks a fine American accent and has some amusing lines, but she can't match Miriam Hopkins' wonderful Aunt Penniman...
...Like much of James' early and late fiction, the novel is about a clash of cultures, the contrast of American, British and Continental sensibilities...
...The excessive Steadicam shots are disorienting...
...Leigh is awkward and tongue-tied, an overgrown girl who consistently makes a fool of herself in grand company...
...By cutting around the home of Doctor Sloper, where most of the action takes place (and giving us some of the most sublime shots of staircases ever filmed), he managed to make what was essentially a series of conversations cinematically arresting...
...The Heiress, too, was an adaptation of Washington Square...
...Her priggish husband, who in the novel imprisons her with stern words, here pushes, trips and slaps her...
...How do you photograph a thought...
...You might become so caught up in it that you won't care about Milly dying as beautifully and easily as Ali McGraw in Love Story...
...The delicate emotional dynamics of the Wyler film provided its force: A turn of the head, a gesture of the hand spoke volumes...
...Its script was by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, who had earlier turned the book into a hit Broadway play...
...but it also contains sequences of drunken, bohemian revelry, an interlude set in an opium den, and hints of a homoerotic attraction between its two heroines...
...One of the novel's most extraordinary triumphs is the way it develops the abiding friendship the three central figures feel for one another, even as they are torn apart over Milly's fortune...
...Yet Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller (1974) and François Truffaut's The Green Room (1978) handle James with greater subtlety and overall are more effective...
...The finest moments in all of the adaptations occur when the author's own words are spoken...
...By replacing deep feeling with lust, Jane Campion, Agnieszka Holland and Iain Softley have taken marvelous original material and turned it into movies that are at worst drab and at best mildly entertaining...
...Olivia de Havilland gave an extraordinary portrayal of apainfully shy woman...
...And Kate Croy, for all her faults, is wise, thoughtful and sympathetic...
...And perhaps because he has a reputation for being even more stuffy and opaque than Austen, the current films based on his books include unnecessarily sensationalistic sequences that make what was done with Austen seem mild by comparison...
...When Densher realizes his beloved wants him to marry Milly for her money so that at her death he and Kate will be able to wed, he turns to her in astonishment and murmurs, "Oh, oh, oh...
...James was amazingly adept at creating strong female characters, women who retained a fierce integrity even when they made wrong decisions...
...Their strength of character, the very quality that in the novels makes them equal with, if not superior to, the men is thus compromised...
...Along with William Wyler's The Heiress (1949), the foremost film based on a James novel, these movies do not try to spice up their stories...
...As his career progressed, he devoted longer and longer passages to the ruminations of his characters, catching them at the moment before they made a decision or performed an action...
...Isabel Archer, the protagonist of Jane Campion's dreary The Portrait of a Lady, fantasizes that three of her suitors surround and touch her...
...Isabel Archer is passionate as well as deeply intelligent, witty, strong, and brave...
...Kate's ambition is terrible, yet she is one of James' most independent-minded heroines, straggling against enormous adversity...
...Wyler was one of a handful of directors who worked brilliantly within enclosed spaces...
...His introspective style is a formidable challenge for a filmmaker...
...Holland, despite dramatizing more scenes from the novel, does not do half so good a job at capturing its spirit...
...Inreply,Kate says, "Yes, yes, yes...
...Catherine, Isabel and Kate do not seem particularly smart or morally aware...
...But, together with the social themes, they have been deleted from the movie...
...Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square adds scenes of a mother lying in her bloody childbirth deathbed, a nervous young girl urinating in public, and an unrequited lover rolling despairingly in the mud...
...Her love scenes with Montgomery Clift were so compelling that they made the viewer hope he was sincere...
...The logic behind such additions, which James would have found vulgar, may be that since film is a visual medium, it must make its points through bold, direct illustration...
...Meanwhile, Kate is taken in by her rich Aunt Maude, who scorns Densher and introduces Kate to aristocratic company, hoping her beauty will win her a rich husband...
...Catherine Sloper is plump, shy and plain, but she thinks with greater clarity and honesty than those around her...
...Still, since The Wings of the Dove is a masterpiece of James' final period, one would expect it to be much more difficult to tackle than Washington Square, written in the middle period when by contrast his prose was positively breezy...
...Should you find yourself perplexed that Densher completely betrays his principles in the very last scene, it may be because this contradicts the novel's far more desolate ending...
...As Catherine, Jennifer Jason Leigh is game but she and Holland turn what should be simplicity and shyness into an embarrassing oafishness...
...Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove is already notorious for its long climactic nude scene...
...Like Campion in The Portrait of a Lady, Holland dramatizes her heroine's dilemma as a physical, not a psychological, problem...
...If they thought they could liberate Henry James' heroines for contemporary audiences by sacrificing their minds at the altar of their passions, the filmmakers were deeply mistaken...
...The movie, which sets the story in 1910, replaces those fascinating themes with shot after shot of men and women lounging on divans in sexually provocative positions, dragging on cigarettes, chasing after each other in Venetian gondolas, groping one another furtively in public places...
...After hundreds of pages of dense prose, these simple exclamations are utterly shattering...
...his dialogue, while elliptical, is truly expressive...
...You won't feel a similar betrayal of Kate, who in the movie suffers for her contrivances but schemes on her own, making Milly and Densher into her hapless victims...
...If you see the film without having lately read the book, you will find it diverting, competently acted, handsome to look at, even a little moving...
...For all their noise, both movies fail to delineate their characters' internal complexity...
...it was the chief preoccupation of his fiction...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
