by David Lodge
The door opens.
PORTRESS: A visitor to see you.
Isabel comes into the room.
The door shuts behind her.
Isabel steps into the lamplight.
Pansy looks at her as if at an apparition. Pansy’s voice out of the shadows:
PANSY: You’ve come back.
Isabel—eyes dazzled by light—finds it hard to see the girl in the shadows beyond the lamplight.
ISABEL: Yes, I’ve come for you.
She holds out her hand towards Pansy.
Pansy sees Isabel’s hand, held out, in the brightest part of the light.
The End
Apparently this scene was shot, but not used (wisely, I believe). In the final editing Campion chose to end the film earlier than either screenplay or novel. Isabel has her final meeting with Caspar Goodwood in the snow-covered grounds of the Touchetts’ country house, Gardencourt (the snow is a detail added by the film). Goodwood makes his passionate appeal, and takes Isabel in his arms. She responds to his kiss, but then breaks away and runs back to the door of the house. She stops with her hand on the door, turns, and looks back at him. Freeze frame: end of film. Isabel’s expression and body language in the freeze frame are ambiguous. Is she turning back to Goodwood, deciding not to open the door that leads back to social respectability and emotional sterility? Or is she asserting that she is not running away at all, but courageously “affronting her destiny”? (This is James’s phrase in the Preface to the New York edition of the novel, using “affront” in the slightly archaic sense of to confront defiantly.) It is impossible to tell. But this indeterminate conclusion is preferable to the screenplay’s sentimental ending.
The Wings of the Dove was the best received of the recent James films. Stephen Holden in the New York Times, for instance, said: “Few films have explored the human face this searchingly and found such complex psychological topography. That’s why The Wings of the Dove succeeds where virtually every other film translation of a James novel has stumbled . . The English director [Iain Softley] has found the equivalent of James’s elaborately analytical prose in the shadow play of eagerness, suspicion and self-doubt flickering across the face of its troubled three main characters.” Holden put his finger on the fundamental challenge of adapting James for the cinema. Not all of his colleagues were as impressed as this, but the film did well at the box office, and was nominated for two Oscars—for Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as Kate Croy and for Hossein Amini’s screenplay.
This screenplay has been published, with a short but very interesting introduction by the writer. I happen to know that Amini was commissioned to write the screenplay after the film had been in development for several years, beginning with a script by the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin, which was much more faithful to the original novel. Amini (who had previously scripted Jude, a feature film adaptation of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure), describes his first impression of James’s novel as follows:
. . . an extraordinary book, but very long, very dense, and completely uncinematic. The story telling was internal, the key scenes were all reported after the event, and each character took on the narrative in a baton structure.3
But Amini had always been a fan of film noir, the generic term given by French film theorists to certain Hollywood films of the 1940s that dealt with stories of illicit love and crime from the point of view of the transgressors—films like Mildred Pierce, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Double Indemnity. In The Wings of the Dove he perceived a “film noir in costume” waiting to be made: “two lovers deceive and betray a friend and corrupt their love in the process. It was irresistible to a noir buff.” Amini candidly admits that “by reducing the novel to its basic story spine we risked losing much of the texture and complexity of the original, and there was a danger of drifting into melodrama.” But, he claims, this was the only way to make a film of James’s novel that would engage a modern mass audience. And he was to a large extent justified by the result.
“Where the book plays the major confrontations ‘off camera,’” Amini says, “I had to reinvent them.” In fact most of the scenes in the film are either invented by Amini, or deviate significantly from the corresponding scenes in the novel. Some examples of invented scenes: Kate tracking her father to an opium den; Densher being denied access to Aunt Maud’s house; Kate and Milly giggling over pornographic illustrations in a bookshop; Milly’s first meeting with Densher at a party which he attends with another woman on his arm—a deliberate provocation to Kate; Kate visiting Densher at his newspaper office; Kate visiting Densher in his lodgings. Lord Mark is transformed into a drunken villain, and he blunders into Kate’s bedroom in the middle of the night, when she is his guest, to say that he intends to marry Milly for her money but really desires Kate. The whole Venice carnival sequence, in which Milly excites Kate’s jealousy by dancing with Densher, provoking Kate into letting Densher have sex with her standing up against a wall on the canalside, is, needless to say, invented—and incidentally is taking place at the wrong time of year.
Most of these changes have an erotic content, and one could say that the general effect of Amini’s screenplay and Softley’s direction, like Jane Campion’s in The Portrait, but even more boldly, is to bring the implied sexuality of James’s story to the surface, at the expense of considerable anachronism in the representation of manners. The filmmakers moved the implied date of the action forward by about ten years, but this was done mainly for design reasons and does not make the invented behaviour of the characters any more plausible or consistent. James’s Kate Croy would not, for instance, have dreamed of visiting Densher unchaperoned in his lodgings: the essence of the lovers’ dilemma in the novel is that they can’t marry because of a lack of money and they can’t meet in private because they aren’t married.
The result of this very free adaptation is a rather vulgar, but very watchable, version of the novel. Two examples follow, from the beginning and the end of the film, both of which derive from scenes in the novel but deviate significantly from them. In the novel James explains, through Kate’s internalised reminiscence, that she had met Densher long before her mother’s death and before she moved in with her Aunt Maud—first at a party, and then by chance some weeks later, when they caught sight of each other in the crowded carriage of a London Underground train (it is one of the first literary novels in English to use such a setting). As the seats emptied, Densher moved closer to Kate so he could exchange some polite greeting. She guessed that he was staying on past his intended destination to keep her company, and indeed he got out at her stop and accompanied her home. So their mutual attachment began.
The film begins with a moody, atmospheric credit sequence set in the Underground, overlaid with a plangent sound track. Standing in a crowded carriage, Kate catches the eye of a young man who, politely but expressionlessly, gets to his feet to offer her his seat. She takes it wordlessly. At the next stop she gets out and he follows her until they are alone in a lift. As it rises to the ground level they suddenly turn to each other and passionately embrace. The fact that they don’t speak to each other up to this point implies that this is their first encounter, and that the embrace must be read as the explosion of some sudden and irrepressible sexual chemistry between two strangers (rather like the first meeting of the lovers in Last Tango in Paris). But when Densher’s fondling becomes overtly sexual, he murmurs, “Kate,” and she says, “No, Densher”—then it is apparent that they know each other, and we can only infer that the way they behaved up to that point was some kind of sexual game to heighten the excitement of the meeting. There was no social reason why they shouldn’t have greeted each other in the train, or pretended that they didn’t know each other. It goes without saying that James’s characters would never have behaved in either of these two ways. In the published script, incidentally, they don’t say anything to each other in the lift, maintaining the ambiguity to the very end of the opening sequence. It cannot be denied that this succeeds in
the primary task of an opening sequence: to seize the audience’s attention, and draw them into the world of the film.
The ending of The Wings of the Dove provides one of the great moments in James’s late work. There are in fact two key scenes after Milly has died, leaving Densher and Kate feeling unhappy and uneasy. In the first, Densher gets a letter written in Milly’s hand which he shows to Kate. Together they burn it without reading it. Then Densher gets a letter from a New York law firm, and sends it to Kate, unopened. She brings it back to him, opened. They both know it contains news of a bequest to Densher—what they had plotted to achieve all along. But now Densher does not feel he can accept the money. Kate won’t marry him without it, except on one condition:
“Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory.”
“Oh—her memory!”
“Ah”—she made a high gesture—“don’t speak of it as if you couldn’t be. I could in your place; and you’re one for whom it will do. Her memory’s your love. You want no other.”
He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”
“As we were?”
“As we were.”
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”
In the film these two scenes are conflated. Kate comes to Densher’s lodgings because he has been avoiding her. He shows her the unopened letter from Milly. She throws it on the fire. Then she goes into his bedroom, takes off her clothes, and lies down on the bed, curled up like an unhappy child. Heavy rain streams down the windowpane and darkens the room. Densher undresses and joins Kate on the bed. After some verbal fencing about Milly, they make love. After their climax, the screenplay reads as follows:
For a moment neither speaks.
MERTON: I’m going to write that letter.
KATE: Do whatever you want.
MERTON: I want to marry you, Kate. (There’s a long silence.) Without her money.
KATE: Is that your condition?
MERTON: Yes.
KATE: Am I allowed one too?
MERTON: Of course you are.
KATE buries her face deeper in his chest. She kisses it softly. Her eyes are wet.
KATE: Give me your word of honour . . . Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory . . .?
MERTON stares out, he doesn’t reply. They stay there a moment longer in each other’s arms.
KATE rolls away from him and gets out of bed. She takes her clothes and walks into the next door room.
MERTON doesn’t follow her, he lies in bed and listens to her put her clothes back on, he hears her walk out of the door and close it behind her, he hears her footsteps on the stairs. He makes no attempt to follow her.
He lies back and stares at the ceiling, there are tears in his eyes. He rolls over on his front.
EXT. FLASHBACK. VENICE DAY.
A black and silver funeral barge moves like a silent arrow through the water.
MERTON (off): “My heart is sore pained within me, and the terrors of death are fallen upon me, Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then I would fly away, and be at rest.”
This sequence is rather different from the other examples I have considered in that the problem of rendering consciousness doesn’t arise: in James’s text the thoughts and motivation of the characters are all out in the open, articulated in dialogue. Amini has, however, used this dialogue sparingly, has deliberately discarded the great curtain line of the original, “We shall never be again as we were” (presumably as too theatrical), and has instructed the actors to convey the emotions they are feeling by their expressions and their body language. Kate’s wordless offering of herself to Densher is a displacement of a sexual consummation that James refers to, but never of course describes, in the novel: it is the price Densher exacts from Kate in Venice for pretending to be in love with Milly. So it is dramatically appropriate, though it would have been even more effective if it had been their first lovemaking—Kate keeping her side of the bargain even as the prize slips from her grasp—and the implausible coupling beside the Venice canal had been omitted. The scene has a powerful erotic charge, but it is a sad, doomed kind of sexuality Helena Bonham Carter’s thin, white, naked torso, writhing above the prone Densher in what looks more like pain than ecstacy, is reminiscent of the paintings of Egon Schiele.
The finished film omits the quotation from the psalm, and adds another brief scene showing Densher returning to Venice, looking fairly prosperous and cheerful, presumably using Milly’s legacy to dedicate himself to her memory. This seems to be another mistaken effort to provide a slightly more upbeat ending than the original, and is certainly much less effective than either Amini’s or James’s conclusions.
In their long-lasting partnership Ismail Merchant and James Ivory have developed a distinctive, but conservative, style of adapting classic and modern fiction that is sometimes unfairly derided by young cineastes as “heritage” cinema. In commenting publicly on his film of The Wings of the Dove, the director Iain Softley cited Merchant-Ivory as a model he didn’t want to follow, and in that respect he certainly succeeded. I have faint but agreeable memories of Merchant and Ivory’s lively version of The Europeans (1979). The Bostonians (1984) was an honourable failure at adapting what James himself acknowledged is a flawed novel (he excluded it from the New York edition of his work). Their adaptations of Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End, and of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day are, however, benchmarks of the genre: beautifully acted, ravishing to look at, produced with scrupulous attention to period detail, and intelligently respectful of their sources. All of them were scripted by the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, as is their production of The Golden Bowl.
The first few minutes of this film suggest that the team has deviated drastically from its usual style—either that, or you have taken a wrong turning in the multiplex and are watching a different movie entirely. It seems to be a Websterian melodrama about aristocratic sex and violence in Renaissance Italy: a lady has been discovered in flagrante delicto with her stepson by her older (and allegedly impotent) husband and is dragged off, spitting defiance, to summary execution by his soldiers. Cut to 1903, and this lurid tale turns out to be an episode in the family history of Prince Amerigo, which he is relating to Charlotte as he gives her a guided tour of his dilapidated palazzo—and, in the nicest possible way, the push, because of his forthcoming marriage to Maggie.
This invented prologue develops what is a mere hint in James’s text—that the Prince’s family history has its dark and scandalous passages—into a kind of parallel narrative evoked and alluded to several times in the course of the main action, which takes place in England. For example, a ballet enacting essentially the same story is performed at a private party attended by the principal characters, causing them some discomfiture (“Just like Hamlet!” as one of the guests exclaims), and Amerigo and Maggie’s little boy dresses up with a toy sword and paper helmet that recall the shadows of the soldiers in the opening sequence. There are several hints (not to be found in James’s text) that Adam Verver might take violent revenge on the Prince if sufficiently provoked by jealousy.
This strand in the film was obviously designed to add some extra excitement, colour, and suspense to what is essentially a psychological study of characters constrained by the manners of their time and class from any overt display of violent passion. After the initial surprise (for those who know the book) it doesn’t have the disruptive effect of the gestures to modernity in Softley’s Wings of the Dove or Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady, but is fully assimilated into the period illusionism of the film. To Jamesians it will inevitably seem a distracting and unnecessary embellishment, but others may well find that it enlivens what is otherwise a restrained and deliberately paced movie.
James’s novel is divided
into two parts, entitled “The Prince” and “The Princess” respectively, and the author, who regarded it as his masterpiece, was particularly proud of the “manner in which the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters” (Preface to the New York edition). This is not strictly true: we get glimpses into what some of the other characters are thinking and feeling in both parts, and there are choric interludes in which the Assinghams analyse and interpret the enigmatic behaviour of the principals. But it is vital to the effect of the book that in the first half we experience the story mainly from the Prince’s point of view, and have no privileged access to the Princess’s mind, while in the second half the reverse is true.
In the film, because of the nature of the medium, all the characters are equally transparent—or equally opaque. The actors can only reveal their thoughts by what they say, or by their facial expressions and body language. Happily The Golden Bowl is extremely well cast, and James Ivory has drawn from his performers ensemble acting of a very high order. Uma Thurman is outstanding as Charlotte—though admittedly the effect of adaptation, as well as the story itself, gives her a wider range of emotions to display than the other principals (Jeremy Northam as Amerigo, Kate Beckinsale as Maggie, and Nick Nolte as Adam Verver) are afforded. Anjelica Huston and James Fox give excellent support as the Assinghams, together with Madeleine Potter as the frisky Lady Castledean. All are adept at acting with their eyes, implying layers of unspoken thoughts. A good example, early in the film, is the quick oblique glance that Charlotte gives the Prince over Maggie’s shoulder as the two women embrace at their first meeting after Charlotte and Adam’s engagement. It combines triumph with a certain trepidation; it promises discretion about the past as it invites complicity in the future.