« OGIC: Fortune cookies | Main | TT: Digital update »
October 28, 2003
OGIC: And it was dead, dead, dead
If you're just tuning in, we've been talking about James on film today (cue the Duran Duran, somebody). Terry's words on behalf of The Heiress this morning (scroll down just a bit) have triggered a small flood of emailed harumphs. Casey Abell writes to steer me toward it and away from The Innocents, which he says "yanks the interpretation toward the governess-is-nuts viewpoint by showing her looking at a picture of Quint before her exact description to Mrs. Grose. This spoils the key ambiguity about whether the ghosts exist outside her active imagination."Cinetrix also stamps The Heiress with her approval, citing only one caveat: "Montgomery Clift is as dreamy and sleazy/weak-willed as you want, and de Havilland is heartbreaking as Catherine. But Aunt Penniman--oh dear....The movie completely defangs her. She's rendered dithery rather than menacing the way she is in the novel, where her manner of speaking and thinking infects everyone's language."
Casey goes on to ask why all the animus from my corner toward the Wings of the Dove film. It's a good question. A very, very good question. Could it be that I have always felt unreasonably possessive of this novel and jealous of others' appropriations? Am I simply that petty? Yeah, that's part of it. I've been searching my memory, and the only specific criticism I can remember having is of how explicitly and unimaginatively the film represents the bargain struck between Kate Croy and Merton Densher. By showing their liaison in all its immediacy, director Iain Softley theoretically can let the viewer better understand and sympathize with Densher's desire and his choice.
But if the sex scene comes off as just another ho-hum sex scene, despite the transparent and shameless employment of Helena Bonham Carter's naked rear end, as I recall, in the manner of a flashing neon sign advertising "HOT sex"--well, you risk making Densher seem like just some pathetic bounder, altogether unworthy of Milly, and tipping the delicate balance of imperatives that gives James's moral drama its life. And this is what happens. Densher sacrifices Milly for the promise of a night with Kate, that night turns out to consist of bland movie sex, and the whole story becomes hard to take seriously, the dénouement easy to misunderstand. It wasn't just the censors that held James back from depicting the sex in his novel; it was solid professional know-how.
Still, I admit, this is slender evidence on which to hang the whole movie. In the end, I think that the parts of the novel I'm in love with are close to off-limits to Softley or any other filmmaker. Mainly I'm thinking of the big recognition scene, when Milly is snapped out of her dream of being a figure in a Watteau canvas, like the airy people around her in the Matcham gallery, and shown incontestably that she is as different from them as possible--a Bronzino, and doomed. To be honest, I can't even remember whether the movie showed the portrait. But I know it didn't make as big a deal of the scene as I thought it should have.
After thinking this through, I'm deciding that the problem is mine, a symptom of over-attachment. Just as sometimes you can't get there from here, they can't make a movie of this novel that I will like.
Posted October 28, 2003 4:55 AM
