The Wings of the Dove

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by John Simon

I HAVE always had problems with Henry James. Good Henry James strikes me as inferior Marcel Proust, and bad Henry James as not worth pursuing down its labyrinthine ways. But our concern here is with James on film. There the high points were the rather free adaptation of Washington Square as The Heiress (1949) and the no less free version of The Turn of the Screw as The Innocents (1961). The several others are not worth mentioning, least of all Jane Campion's odious Portrait of a Lady, whose opening sequence alone is enough to turn a Jacobite into a Jacobin. The current remake of Washington Square, as reviewed here (Nov. 10), does not wash either.

Now, however, comes The Wings of the Dove, which, for the aforementioned reasons, I have been unable to read, but which, on screen, proves a rare delight. James readers inform me of oversimplifications, omissions, and crude additions; still, even they concede that Iain Softley's film, with a screenplay by Hossein Amini, is a notable achievement. To be sure, anyone can find some flaws here; how, for instance, does the impecunious journalist Merton Densher manage to leave London and his job for a protracted, nonworking stay in Venice? Some changes result from the filmmakers' updating the action by a decade, but those strike me as altogether to the good.

So, in the film's dazzling opening sequences a young man sees a young woman on the crowded London Underground, approaches her, and seems to start a flirtation with her. It is unclear whether they know each other or not. Soon they are descending in a lift into which the fellow has followed the seemingly fleeing girl. On the way down, she remains aloof; in the next shot, on the way up, the two are in a passionate clinch. Thus retold, this may not sound like much, but against the background of a quaint-looking subway, with two apparently proper Victorians behaving so turbulently, and with consecutive sequences in rapidly switching directions, a teasing suspense is created, complete with elevator-like frissons running up and down one's spine.

The lady in question is Kate Croy, being brought up by her affluent and calculating Aunt Maude (Charlotte Rampling, and excellent) to be a prosperous society lady, unlike her sorry wretch of a widowed father. The young man is Merton Densher, with whom Kate is having it on. They would marry, but the girl is mercenary enough to be seduced by her aunt's ultimatum to give up the penniless Densher and marry upward.

Besides the subway, there is the telephone, exuding its non-Jamesian but fascinating novelty -- a sense of intrigue, whose predestined tool it is. So, too, the new prevalence of electricity, promising a more conquerable world, and the revolutionized women's fashions, less confining and more enticing, adding to the sense of freedom and modernity. Sandy Powell, the costume designer, has wisely followed the period designs of the great Mariano Fortuny.

There arrives in London a young American heiress, Millie Theale, pretty and loaded. She and Kate become friends and, before you know it, the two of them and Merton are frolicking around Venice together. Having found out that Millie is mortally ill, Kate goes back to London, to let Millie have at least one love affair in her life -- with Merton. Then she would leave her money to him, and he and Kate could wed wealthily. Needless to say, things don't quite work out like that, although the movie does leave the ending a trifle fuzzy.

What is wonderful here is the contrast between London and Venice and their lifestyles. The film manages to make the two of them vividly, differently real. Especially remarkable is the Venice that Softley and his cinematographer, Eduardo Serra, have conjured up. Although some of the locales are the obvious ones, they are shot in unusual weather or at atypical times of day or night. The result is not a burstingly sunny Venice, as in David Lean's lush Summertime, but an ordinary, everyday city with sullen moods, rowdy goings-on, disquieting crannies. Nevertheless, a Venice whose essence intoxicates.

It is nice that, for the interiors of Millie's rented abode, the filmmakers could secure the very Palazzo Leporelli (a/k/a Barbaro) where James spent many months. More important, they show us less trodden byways, as well as some phantasmagoric revels, with a casual candor that lets the poetic jut out, almost unbidden, from the quotidian. Against this setting, the curious trio of principals stands out vulnerable, confused, adrift. It is superlatively enacted by Helena Bonham Carter (Kate) and Linus Roache (Merton), and somewhat less well by Alison Elliott (Millie). Miss Elliott, so good in The Spitfire Grill, is here a little too bland, unable to convey the doom that Millie carries within. Elizabeth McGovern does little for her friend Susan; but Alex Jennings gets the most out of the fortune-hunting Lord Mark, and Michael Gambon, good always (and only) in repellent roles, scores as Kate's father.

The amazing thing is that Iain Softley, known hitherto chiefly for his adroit film about the early days of the Beatles, Backbeat, should have tackled Wings of the Dove at all, and then come up a winner. His scenarist, Hossein Amini (who also did well by Thomas Hardy on the underrated Jude), deserves equal credit. What the film lacks is the convolutions and impotence that characterize Henry James, which suits me fine. I only wish there were not so much of Ed Shearmur's music on the soundtrack: a few measures less would have helped immeasurably.