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
