Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Portrait of a Lady

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jane Campion (1996)

    Jane Campion’s adaptation of the Henry James novel, with a screenplay by Laura Jones, is a visual feast, sometimes almost literally:  the splendours of the set decoration include some very appealing food.   The action switches between England (a country estate and London) and Italy (Florence and Rome) and the images in each location are composed, angled and coloured with taste and care.  The working into these compositions of the tones, textures and movement of the characters’ clothes is especially striking.  (The cinematography is by Stuart Dryburgh, and the production and costume design by Janet Patterson.)  Campion tends to overwork the images, though.  During an early conversation between the protagonist Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman) and her friend Henrietta Stackpole (Mary-Louise Parker), the camera is static while the two women, as they speak, move to and fro in an unnatural choreography.  As Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich)’s courtship of Isabel reaches its climax in a sun-baked Florence, he revolves a black and white parasol before her to dazzling effect – it’s part a spider’s web, part a magnetic, malignant insect.   The effect in both cases is that you’re conscious of what the director, rather than of what Isabel or Henrietta or Osmond, is doing.

    In Bright Star, more than a decade later, Campion skilfully got her cast to speak and express their feelings in ways that made their early nineteenth-century characters accessible without seeming anachronistic.   She manages to do the same with the people in the 1870s world of The Portrait of a Lady but she also indulges in more imposed modernisms:  the opening montages of voices and photographs of late twentieth-century women discussing what it means to be kissed and looking into the camera; Isabel’s sexual fantasy, involving her and all three of her current suitors; a witty black-and-white assembly of what-I-did-on-my-international tour film clips, which also culminates in a more alarming expression of her sexual imagination.  When Osmond, in Isabel’s presence, caresses his teenage daughter Pansy (Valentina Cervi), the movement of his hands suggests incestuous appetite rather than affection.  This moment has a creepy charge but, once you think about it, amounts to little more than Jane Campion saying, ‘You don’t get this sort of thing reading Henry James’.  (I shouldn’t think you do anyway.)

    It’s to Campion and Laura Jones’ credit that they eschew interior monologue and narration from the novel.  The trouble is that, without James’ voice or detailed explanation of how the characters’ minds are working, the story is at risk of becoming behavioural rather than psychological.   Once the action switches to Italy, you get very quickly the opposition between, on the one hand, the glorious houses, gardens and interior designs and, on the other, the self-serving and deceitful nature of Gilbert Osmond and the alluring Madame Merle.  (The latter has an ulterior motive in proposing to Osmond that he marry Isabel, whom Madame Merle befriended in England and whose rich uncle has now unexpectedly bequeathed a large part of his fortune to his niece.)  The Portrait of a Lady runs nearly two-and-a-half hours:  that isn’t long enough for Jane Campion fully to reproduce James’ larger portrait of the mores of wealthy (and less wealthy) expatriate Americans in Victorian England and continental Europe yet it feels too long a time to explore the themes of personal responsibility and treachery that are so salient in this adaptation.   This approach certainly puts a great pressure on the actors.  Although too many meaningful looks are exchanged (and Campion often holds them a moment too long), most of the cast rise to the challenge.

    As Isabel Archer, Nicole Kidman gives one of her best and more likeable performances.   It’s a help that the opportunities for her to be knowing and superior are very limited in this role.  Isabel is a determined freethinker who is also an innocent abroad, a young woman whom less moral and more sophisticated people are trying to exploit.  Kidman holds the camera in a way that’s less self-aware than usual.  She’s very good at showing how Isabel’s mind is working and at dramatising the repeated emotional wallops that overwhelm the young woman’s intelligence.   John Malkovich’s Osmond is relatively disappointing, not least because the reptilian suavity is so familiar.  This is an increasing problem as the film progresses.  In Osmond’s opening conversation with Madame Merle, Malkovich gives The Portrait of a Lady a welcome injection of misanthropic (and self-loathing) wit but although he does enough to convince you that Isabel would be intrigued by Osmond he isn’t quite charming enough during their courtship.  Once their horrific marriage is underway, Malkovich makes Osmond, a collector of objets d’art, flagrantly unpleasant with Isabel and in others’ company – there’s no social veneer to mask the innate nastiness.   The scene in which Osmond inflicts physical violence on Isabel instead of the usual psychological brutality, while it is upsetting, would have greater impact if Malkovich had seemed superficially more of a gentleman.

    Jane Campion gives Barbara Hershey a great ‘entrance’ as Madame Merle.  Isabel comes into a room in her aunt and uncle’s house and is entranced by the music (Schubert) being played on a piano by someone she can see but we can’t.   By this point, we have seen that Isabel is dissatisfied, in different ways, by each of her suitors:  you’re held by her fascination with the music and assume that it will be a new man at the piano.  You think that the unseen actor, whoever he is, will have to be quite something to justify this build-up; it’s highly effective when the piano player turns out to be Hershey.   She’s a more persuasive dissimulator than Malkovich.  As a result, Madame Merle’s eventual tears and distress – in an exchange with Osmond which confirms that he’s in a different class as an egotistical operator – is affecting.  Martin Donovan has warmth and depth as Ralph Touchett and Richard E Grant is surprisingly good as Lord Warburton.  The cast also includes Viggo Mortensen as another of Isabel’s unsuccessful admirers, Shelley Duvall as Osmond’s sister, and Christian Bale, who struck me as a bit too petulant as the young man in love with Pansy.   Shelley Winters, in one of her last screen roles, is still wonderfully incisive as Isabel’s aunt.  John Gielgud plays her dying husband with remarkable ease and economy; there’s a sense that both the actor and the character he’s playing are demob happy.

    12 September 2012

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Albert Lewin (1945)

    I think I’d seen it only once before – in my teens (I read the novel a few years later).   A few things had always stayed with me:  the main characters’ names, the waxen handsomeness of Hurd Hatfield in the title role, the portrait in its later stages of corruption, and – especially – the melody of the song ‘Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird’ and the way Angela Lansbury (as Sybil Vane , the vaudeville performer whom Dorian courts and then destroys) sings it.   Seeing the film again makes me understand why I remembered these things but there’s much more to admire.  Because George Sanders’ character range was narrow, his skill in playing witty cads is greatly underrated:  as Lord Henry Wotton, the languidly baleful influence on Dorian, Sanders dispatches the epigrams in a way that both gives them maximum impact and sounds completely natural to the character.  Lord Henry is innately a verbal showoff but Sanders understands – and has the technique to prove triumphantly – that showing off needn’t mean ‘theatrical’ pointing up of the relentlessly brilliant lines, which so often makes listening to Wilde a gruelling experience.  Sanders brings out the hard core of Lord Henry’s cynicism so that – when Dorian’s heartless sensualism has begun to cause real harm but the aphorisms keep coming – your laughter is withheld.

    The gradually repellent effect of the witty words is achieved – to a minor extent – by Hurd Hatfield too.  Although he seems very wooden at the start, there are later hints that he’s trying for something subtle in his tiny flickers of emotional sensitivity.  His face is beautifully immobile to such a degree that it does, whether or not through the actor’s skill, realise in a highly effective way the central idea of Dorian’s looks not changing while the picture-in-the-attic expresses his increasing moral degeneration.  For much of the time, Hatfield is so lacking in animation that he truly does seem to have swapped places with his portrait.   Angela Lansbury gives an unforgettable performance – in the fusion of Sybil Vane’s poise as a performer and the crystalline sweetness of her singing voice, in her sensuous bloom, which overwhelms a streak of common sense, as she falls in love with Dorian.  When Sybil receives his letter rejecting her, Lansbury is calmly, gravely undemonstrative – it makes the news of Sybil’s death a few minutes later all the more poignant.

    This makes Dorian Gray sound a lot less enjoyable than it actually is (it’s also more eventful that I’d remembered).    There are some effects which don’t work.  The insertion of colour shots of the portrait into the black-and-white photography (which won an Oscar for Harry Stradling) look clumsy today.  The closing shot of Dorian’s death’s head – once the portrait has regained its youth and his body has reabsorbed his depravity – must have been as much a risible horror-film anti-climax then as it is now.    But, for the most part, this is  an exciting as well as a richly entertaining supernatural melodrama.    Hurd Hatfield’s virtual disappearance from the screen within a few years means that he’s frozen in this part for ever – that obviously gives a retrospective edge to watching him, particularly given Wilde’s theme and plot.   There are others too who (as far as I know) were rarely if ever heard of again (no great surprise in that – although they’re not bad here):   Lowell Gilmore (as the portrait painter), Richard Fraser (Sybil’s would-be avenging brother), Douglas Walton (as a man whom Dorian blackmails into disposing of a corpse), Morton Lowry (striking as a dissipated friend of Dorian, who hangs out after dark in the same lowlife locale).   Two members of the cast who certainly were heard of again are Donna Reed, as the painter’s daughter, and Peter Lawford, who looks distinctively normal in this company, as her suitor.

    1 October 2008

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