From the "Movies" Archives:

by Brandon Judell

(indieWIRE/ 04.27.01) -- Charlotte Stant is an exquisite, snappish, self-interested, and impoverished American living life at the beck and call of European high society, members of which no doubt enjoy having such a pretty decoration on hand to brighten up their overstuffed sofas or exhausted dinner tables. As embodied by Uma Thurman in James Ivory's latest adaptation of a Henry James novel, this damsel is intermittently incandescent -- although she's no Helena Bonham Carter.

Having scoured a highly mismanaged Manhattan branch of Hollywood Video -- whose employees believe alphabetization is some Ancient Greek circumcision ritual that one should have very little to do with -- I came out away with two Henry James realizations (the invigorating "The Wings of the Dove" and the more docile "The Portrait of the Lady") plus two splendid James Ivory costume dramas based on texts by E. M. Forster ("Howard's End" and "A Room with a View"). Three of these star Miss Bonham Carter who has pretty much made a career of wearing her lush tresses down to her buttocks while attired in heavily petticoated affairs that she has to lift up to allow her inner lust to be sated by some equally on-fire guy. To hell with the societal mores of the time.

To Miss Bonham Carter's credit, she makes every one of her historical creations improbably feasible, sort of like a cultured pre-Twentieth Century Traci Lords. In fact, there should be a law that no costume drama about a young woman in ankle-length gowns who's about to lose her virginity should star anyone else but Miss Bonham Carter.

Sadly, the cracked "Golden Bowl," the tale about the previously mentioned Miss Stant, was made before Joe Lieberman could have enacted such a law.

Well, overlooking this misstep, I'll go on with the plot: Charlotte Stant is in love with the impoverished Italian Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam) who's about to wed Maggie Verver (Kate Beckinsale), the daughter of America's first billionaire Adam (Nick Nolte). You see the Prince needs some cash flow to renovate the family castle, and while Miss Stant would supply great sex, she's no Martha Stewart. She is though a school friend of Maggie, who's unaware her fiancé knows Charlotte quite well.

Well, the marriage takes place, and eventually Charlotte weds Adam, as well, then finally Charlotte copulates with the Prince, which makes everyone quite upset. However, since most of these characters have stiff upper lips, being upset here often means having a camera capturing one's eyes getting misty. If only wars were fought this way, Sarajevo would still be a vacation spot.

Now one of the great pleasures of seeing celluloid adaptations of great classics is that you're drawn back to a book you were forced to do a term paper on in college or had always meant to read before you got hooked on "Sex in the City." Terence Davies' miscast drama introduced me to Edith Wharton's "House of Mirth," one of the best American novels I ever came across.

"The Golden Bowl" is another case totally. The book is unreadable. I couldn't get through it. Director Ivory gave up the first time he tried, and the lovely Uma told me the other day just before she touched my left hand, that the film was the only way people who started the book could find out how it ended.

So what screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has done here is distill the work down to its soap opera basics. A very Good father and daughter (with a very capital "G") wed two people who deceive them. Unlike other works in the James canyon, "The Golden Bowl" is said to end happily which might be because its author was supremely happy himself at the time. He had just fallen in love with a young Anglo-Irish gent named Jocelyn Persse. (Maybe if I had a Jocelyn at this very moment, this review would end happily, too.)

Anyway, Mr. James called "The Golden Bowl" the best novel he had ever written. He also thought he was Napoleon before he died.

The problem here might be Jhabvala's take. According to Gore Vidal in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the book, Maggie and Adam are "monsters on a divine scale." They collect people as they collect art, and when the people refuse to behave as good sculptures ought, they must be slapped down. There is also an air of incest in their relationship. So when Adam marries Charlotte, he's finally getting a daughter he can legally soil.

Most of this never makes it onto the screen. What we have instead is a "Days of Our Lives" story line in refined garb. One can't fault the acting here, although Adam, according to Vidal, is only 47. Nick Nolte hasn't been 47 for a while. A younger dad would have ignited the underlying incest passion more.

As for Ivory's direction, for the first time he seems not to have integrated the mansions, and the artwork, and the costumes as he always managed so well to do in the past. He's one of our most grandly literate helmers, but he needs characters and a plot to care about. For him, "The Golden Bowl" has proven fruitless.