Washington Square

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by John Simon

HENRY James's early novel Washington Square, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz as The Heiress, was a Broadway hit in 1947 with Wendy Hiller and Basil Rathbone. An equally effective movie version of it (1949) was directed by William Wyler and starred Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, and Montgomery Clift. The play was successfully revived a couple of seasons ago with Cherry Jones superb in the title role. After all this, the new movie directed by Agnieszka Holland, and reverting to the original title, Washington Square, comes as an anticlimax, even though it sticks closer to James's text. That is its first mistake.

Miss Holland, a Polish filmmaker working in the West, always struck me as overrated. Best known for such films as Europa, Europa and Olivier, Olivier (her more recent The Secret Garden and Total Eclipse were well-deserved flops), she has never made a movie that impressed me, and this feminist version of Washington Square, which might as well have been entitled with similar echolalia Catherine, Catherine, is no exception. It is the story, you'll recall, of Catherine Sloper, the plain young heiress who falls for the dashing Morris Townsend's impassioned wooing. But her sardonic, domineering father, Dr. Austin Sloper, warns her that the young man is only after her fortune, and says he'll disinherit her if she elopes with him.

Dr. Sloper has never forgiven Catherine for causing the death of his beautiful, beloved wife in childbirth, and for being, unlike her mother, homely. She grows up mocked and bullied by her father, yet his obedient, adoring slave. Only in the case of Morris does she attempt to rebel, but father was right: without her fortune, Morris doesn't want her. Then Dr. Sloper dies and Morris renews his suit. This time, Catherine has her revenge as she spurns him.

The Holland version, written by Carol Doyle, an actress turned scenarist, ignores the Goetzes' ending, with Townsend vainly banging on the Sloper front door as Catherine icily listens within and then goes back up the stairs. The new, Jamesian conclusion, with Catherine sending the man packing after a short conversation inside the house, is infinitely less powerful as an acted ending, whatever may hold true on the page. And there are other, no less infelicitous, changes.

All previous Catherines were played by women; Jennifer Jason Leigh, the incumbent, is an eternal child. She remains a tomboy physically, vocally, and behaviorally in this role too, and she lacks both a period sense and the proper genteel bearing. All this slants the film toward a present-day feminist tone. Add to this Albert Finney's roly-poly, rather more demotic Dr. Sloper, and Maggie Smith's fluttery and unctuous caricature of Aunt Lavinia (Miss Smith's performances have become quite unwatchable), further shifting the emphasis toward vulgarization. Ben Chaplin is an adequate though undistinguished Morris, and the good Judith Ivey does what she can with the thankless role of Aunt Elizabeth.

There is a laudable period look to the movie, shot in Union Square and other Baltimore locations, although bringing in background shots of mid-nineteenth-century urban vignettes further detracts from the psychological drama. Jerzy Zielinski's cinematography is on target, but the overinsistent, though tuneful, music by Jan A. P. Kaczmarek is a problem. His fancy footwork includes setting a well-known twentieth-century poem, "Tu chiami una vita" by Salvatore Quasimodo, as a pseudo-Rossinian duet for Catherine and Morris at the piano, which may work musically but jars verbally. Even more blatant anachronisms occur in the dialogue. When the adolescent Catherine, afraid to sing for her father's guests, mutely wets herself, Dr. Sloper surveys the puddle at her feet and tells a servant, "There's been an accident or something." And when the grown Catherine fetches a drink for her father, she plunks it down with a rather un-Jamesian "Here you go."

Jean-Jacques Annaud's latest, Seven Years in Tibet, may be one of his least successful films, but it does not lack merit. It is based on the autobiography of Heinrich Harrer, a leading Austrian mountain climber, who abandoned his pregnant wife in 1939 for an expedition to climb Nanga Pargat, one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas. On the way down, the Austrians were taken prisoner by the British in India, as war had broken out. Eventually Harrer and a fellow climber, Peter Aufschnaiter, managed to escape, and wandered for two years through the Himalayas.

They had many, often hairy, adventures before arriving at the holy city of Lhasa, which few Westerners had set foot in. Here Peter married and settled down with a local maiden, while Heinrich, against all odds, befriended the adolescent Dalai Lama, and eventually became his tutor. But the tutor learned as much from his pupil: about Buddhism, spirituality, and the good life, and about how much he really missed his own unseen son, who refused repeated attempts at a correspondence. Then China invaded Tibet, and Harrer tried to help, but the odds were overwhelming. Encouraged by the Dalai Lama, he returned to Austria, where his wife had remarried and his son at first avoided him. But Harrer, humanized by his Tibetan experiences, wins him over with the gift of a music box that plays "Clair de lune," and soon father and son are climbing mountains together.