Richard Williams: Movie of the week
It has all the virtues of a classic British costume drama. A dead-on sense of period. Clothes so exquisite they make you want to go shopping. What a surprise, then, that we emerge from The Wings of the Dove thinking mostly about sex.
Sex and Henry James? Hardly the most natural of partners. For James, fictive sex was in the head, and unexpressed. Yet the latest attempt to transfer his prose to the cinema screen reaches its conclusion with the year’s, perhaps the decade’s, most powerful piece of grown-up sex on celluloid, an act so emotionally shocking – raw, tearful, unresolved – and so central to the story that, like a black hole in the cosmos, it seems to pull every bit of the film’s matter into itself.
To record that the sex in question involves Helena Bonham Carter may make it sound even less likely. But among the many qualities of Iain Softley’s film is its transformation of Bonham Carter from a tiresome little snit in period costume to a romantic figure of complexity and conviction. And still in period costume.
As Kate Croy, the daughter of a ruined family who attempts to marry her lover off to a dying American heiress, Bonham Carter dominates the film, moving between watchfulness and abandon with a skill that commands our sympathy, even against the grain of her actions. Although it would hardly have been possible without the work of Softley and his screenwriter, Hossein Amini, her performance depends for its power on her own intellectual grasp of moral ambiguity, and an ability to translate it into something that the camera can see.
Amini and Softley – the director of Backbeat, the well-regarded Beatle-history film, and of the poorly received Hackers – take many liberties with James’s story. The decision to move its period from 1902 to 1910 allows them, through the use of less constricting women’s clothes, to hint at more modern patterns of thought and behaviour.
Kate, in particular, is a figure alienated from her surroundings. Her mother is dead; her father (Michael Gambon) is a derelict. She is taken up by her Aunt Maude (Charlotte Rampling) on the understanding that she will never again see her father or her lover, Merton Densher (Linus Roache), a handsome journalist of shallow ideals and shallower fortune. Launched into London society, she is steered towards an eligible landowner, Lord Mark (Alex Jennings).
But this is a surprisingly dark film, and one of its subjects is the humiliation of the British aristocracy. That, and an investigation of the human heart. Both themes are quickened by the arrival of Millie Theale (Alison Elliott) – beautiful, virtuous, wealthy and doomed. “She’s the world’s richest orphan,” Lord Mark tells Kate, glimpsing the possibility of his own salvation. But when Millie falls for Densher, Kate senses a different outcome.
The film’s Kate is less ruthless than the novel’s, not so driven by cold materialism. Her father’s failure lies behind her refusal to marry Densher in poverty: we see how she might have come to believe that fate can be purely a matter of willpower. Since her friendship with Millie is genuine, she is able to persuade us – and her lover, who is given a perfect veneer of lightweight sincerity by Roache – that her scheme is aimed at serving the general good.
Virtually all the dialogue is freshly created, and Bonham Carter’s demotic asperity contrasts well with Roache’s amiable passivity and Elliott’s serene goodness. Destiny acts on all three in a second half set largely in Venice, where the atmosphere of indulgence and decay nourishes the narrative.
The makers have removed some of James’s characters (such as Kate’s widowed sister) along with his daisy-chains of subordinate clauses, but the remaining minor parts are well served. Rampling’s hauteur is at maximum wattage as she places a necklace at her niece’s throat: “Try to look as if you’ve worn it all your life.” And as Susie Stringham, the heiress’s companion, Elizabeth McGovern reminds us that she would have made a distinguished Millie.
Eduardo Serra’s cinematography, John Beard’s design and Sandy Powell’s costumes create a ravishing look that never obscures the film’s intelligence, nor masks its willingness to ask hard questions in a way more familiar from other kinds of cinema.
“So that’s why you wanted me to come to Venice,” Densher blurts out. “For her.” “For her,” Kate replies. “And for us.” In that moment, they could be – well, who? Bogart and Gloria Grahame, perhaps, in Nick Ray’s In a Lonely Place.
A pair of lovers trapped by their own device, existing beyond time and place. Some costume drama, then. Some film.