The Golden Bowl

"The Golden Bowl" felt more like recent Edith Wharton adaptations like "Age of Innocence" and "House of Mirth" than its Henry James provenance, because the focus is more on the social criticism of a society that forces the impecunious upper class into marriage with pecunious upstarts than the individual faults of people this hypocritical society produces.

But maybe my mind wandered as this was a bit over-long as I seemed to have missed some crucial epiphany when characters changed their relationships where they find true love a manipulable characteristic -- with the audience responding with sharp intakes of breath.

I was surprised how good Uma Thurman was in a costume drama as I had thought of her only as a modernist, while I thought Nick Nolte far too subdued to be a robber baron.

The costumes and settings were gorgeous.

The audience was typical Merchant/Ivory fans -- the woman on my right chastised me during the opening credits for eating my popcorn too loudly, while the guy on my left was snoring almost as soon as the movie started.

(originally written 5/13/2001)

For those people who loved "A Room With a View" and "Howards End" but hated "Surviving Picasso" and "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," all is well in the universe. "The Golden Bowl" is excellent in every way. The film is exquisitely balanced. Nick Nolte, Kate Beckinsale, Angelica Houston and Uma Thurman are all amazing. Jeremy Northam is even better. The cinematography, the writing, the costumes; everything fits together. This is not a sleepy and slow costume drama, it is an exhilarating masterpiece. I do not know how loyal the screenplay is to James' novel, but the story is very moving and even though it is a "period piece," the issues that the characters face somehow seem contemporary. Uma Thurman's character Charlotte is one of the most heart-wrenching on-screen women I've seen recently. I hope the film can keep up a presence until the next Oscar race begins. This is one of the best films I have seen so far this year.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has made "The Golden Bowl" come to life. Henry James's last novel, a rather difficult read, has been told very simply without missing the point of the novel. I have read a lot of criticisms of this movie and cannot understand why a lot of the critics say that it was a difficult movie to understand. The constumes, sets etc. recreated the time most wonderfully. The splendor of the great homes, the decay of the Italian Castle, the history of Amerigo's family, the under currents of feelings between the characters all seemed so right. For some, the movie might feel a little long, but Henry James is a most difficult author to translate into film. I liked the use of old black and white movies for the scenes in New York, it added to the stmosphere.

I agree with Timer, and, frankly am tickled that someone else noticed the resemblance of the antique dealer Jarvis to Henry James himself. I have seen too many of James Ivory's films to feel that this was accidental. But I didn't really see the resemblance until Jarvis came to deliver the bowl. (His shop was rather dark, and he may not have been wearing his cut-away coat at work.) I also thought it interesting how at least twice Jarvis put his hands out to catch the bowl should someone drop it, thus calling our attention to its fragility. (This was crystal, not glass, and who knows whether it will break when dropped?)

The movie was over-long, of course. But it was a feast! There were many scenes that could have been edited down or eliminated, but the luxury of seeing the extra footage was wonderful. It reminded me of another favorite, wonderful(and long) movie, Mike Leigh's *Topsy-Turvey* (about the partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan).

And interestingly, there's the same continuity/accent problem in both. In *The Golden Bowl* Angelica Houston plays some scenes with a distinct American Southern accent and some without. In *Topsy Turvy*, Sullivan's lover is quite British in one scene, chatting on about young Winston, yet at a piano recital she speaks in an American Southern accent. Wouldn't you think someone would have noticed in both instances and just re-looped the audio?

Finally, the only reason I knew that Jarvis resembled Henry James is a book that my wife and I wrote for Harcourt. It's called *About the Author* and contains "juicy-bits profiles" of 125 favorite (living, dead, male, female, etc.) novelists. To put it another way, we assume that the reader has access to most of the boilerplate info on each author (Web searches, encyclopedia articles, textbooks, etc.). So we focus on the stuff you won't find in most of those sources.

As part of our research, we learned that James's novels were often inspired by conversations and stories he heard at the many dinner parties he attended in London. (Between 1878 and 1879, he dined out 140 times.) Shades of Truman Capote?

Although born in New York City in 1843, he became a British citizen in 1915. Henry James also attended Harvard Law School between 1862 and 1863. His father was a friend of Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne. He himself, at age 26, arrived in London and soon met Darwin, George Eliot, Ruskin, Rossetti, William Morris, and others.

He felt that criticism was intellectually superior to creative writing and considered himself primarily a critic. At the time of his death in 1916 at age 72, his novels were all but unread. Only after the observance of his 100th birthday in 1943, when World War II had focused America's attention on Europe, did critics realize that he was one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century.

I'm a sucker for anything set in Edwardian England, good or bad. This is neither. The plot is clever but a little wooly. It takes a while to figure out just who is doing what to whom and why. A father and his daughter each married to the partners in a torrid affair. Rather gives a new meaning to "menage a trois." (Or is it "menage a quatre"?)I don't think even Y&R has tackled this one yet! However the performances are flawless, the settings lush and the cinematography superb. The use in a couple of places of old newsreel footage is especially innovative and interesting but doesn't seem to serve much dramatic purpose. And the symbolism of the golden bowl is a little too obvious and overworked. Nevertheless I liked this movie a lot!