by David Lodge
The film is for the most part faithful to the novel in showing the episode from Olive’s point of view. But it does add a scene not in the book, in which we see Verena and Basil on the shore, beside a rowboat at the water’s edge. Verena, who has been wearing Basil’s jacket, gives it back to him, and he throws it into the boat in a gesture of frustration and defeat as she walks away. It is not at all clear whether they have just come back from a boat trip in the course of which Verena has told Basil that she does not love him, or whether she is refusing to go out in the boat with him, which he interprets as a gesture of rejection. In either case she appears to change her mind, runs back, and throws herself into his arms. They embrace passionately beside the breaking waves. The next we see of Verena (evidently some hours later, to judge by the change of light) she is discovered by Olive, huddled on the sofa looking traumatised. What has happened in the meantime to cause this extreme reaction? The embrace on the seashore doesn’t seem to account for it. If you didn’t know the book, and your Henry James, you might think that Verena had been a victim of date rape.
I have given two examples where the film version cannot match the precision and subtlety of the representation of character and motive in the original novel simply because of the nature of the medium. So I come back to the question I raised earlier. Why have filmmakers been so attracted to James, when the difficulties of filming his work are so obvious and so formidable? There are several possible answers.
Period or costume drama is popular with audiences, and the film industry is always looking for suitable books to adapt. Such films are expensive to make, because of all the historical detail that has to be recreated, but the works on which they are based are mostly out of copyright, so movie rights do not have to be paid for. James’s novels have great parts for American actors as well as British, which is important in an industry dominated financially by America. They give plenty of scope for sumptuous costumes, as well as visually interesting locations—aristocratic country houses, and “heritage” sites like Rome, Florence, and Venice. But they do not involve expensive set-pieces requiring masses of extras and special effects, as many earlier nineteenth-century classics do—there are no battles, revolutions, and the like in James’s novels.
In his use of narrative, James was a transitional novelist, between the elaborately plotted novel of the high Victorian age—Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot—and the modernist experimental novel of consciousness and the unconscious—Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence—in which plot is minimal. Commercial movies must have a strong narrative line. James’s novels do have stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they are about subjects which have always fascinated movie makers and movie audiences: sexual desire and money, and the various ways in which these things can become intertwined. But James’s stories—even in the long novels—are fairly simple. There is not a lot of complication and subplotting. The essential narrative content of The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove can be summarised, or “pitched” as they say in the movie industry, in a couple of sentences. This is an advantage in filmmaking. In adapting a Victorian classic, even as a TV mini-series, you have to discard a huge amount of plot, and a lot of characters. All you have to do with James is condense, and what gets left out is not narrative material, but psychological detail. The Portrait of a Lady is a very long novel—over 600 pages in my World’s Classics edition—but every significant character in it appears in the film, even (fleetingly) Henrietta Stackpole’s lover, Mr. Bantling.
James was not an inherently cinematic novelist avant la lettre as, for example, Thomas Hardy was.2 James never describes situations of extreme physical jeopardy like that of Elfride and Knight on the cliff face in A Pair of Blue Eyes, nor visualises a scene with the startling detail and unusual perspectives of Hardy’s authorial narrator. That doesn’t matter—the filmmaker can bring his own heightened visual effects to the story. James’s natural affinity was with the theatre, not with the new medium of moving pictures which emerged in the later part of his lifetime. He was a constant theatregoer and tried with very limited success to adapt his novels for the stage and to write original plays. This ambition is not surprising, because he was very good at dialogue—the dialogue of educated, upper-class people, mostly, but also on occasion lower-class American English—and he was good at imagining and orchestrating “scenes”—that is, people interacting in social situations, or confronting each other in private moments of conflict. He himself spoke of this as his “scenic method,” and attributed it to his long-standing interest in the theatre. In short, he wrote novels which are full of characters and scenes that can be performed, and which would positively invite performance if they weren’t so heavily enveloped in introspection and analysis.
It is tempting for filmmakers to suppose, therefore, that all you have to do with a Henry James novel is strip out all the psychologising. Then you will be left with a strong story, some interesting characters, and a lot of good lines, which sounds like a recipe for a satisfactory film. But of course it is not as easy as that. Without the psychologising, the plots can seem melodramatic, or difficult to follow, or simply uninteresting. Transferred from the page to the screen, the original dialogue can seem artificial. Ironically (in view of James’s failure as a dramatist), his fiction—at least in the case of the shorter works—has transferred rather more readily to the stage than to the big screen: for example, The Heiress, The Aspern Papers, and The Turn of the Screw. On the stage, melodrama and artificiality are at home.
For those who know and love the novels of Henry James, the movie adaptations will always be more or less disappointing, because of the medium’s inability to do justice to what is arguably the most important component of the books—their detailed and subtle representation of the inner life. Even those who do not know the novels may sense that something is lacking in these films, and wonder why anyone bothered to make them. It is no coincidence that the most critically admired film adaptation, The Europeans, was based on a little-known, relatively slight early work, essentially comic and satiric in tone, with a lot of dialogue and relatively little psychological analysis. Of the four recent major film adaptations, the most successful with film critics and the general public was The Wings of the Dove. It was also the one which took the most liberties with the original text and is therefore most likely to dissatisfy or outrage devoted readers of Henry James’s novels. The films of both Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, in different ways, fall between two stools: trying to be faithful to a classic and trying to make a commercially successful movie for a modern audience. The Golden Bowl comes closest to squaring this circle.
The least satisfactory and least interesting of these films in my opinion is Washington Square, though it should be the easiest of the three to adapt. It is a short novel with a very dramatic story and lots of good scenes, as its previous adaptations for the stage and then the screen (as The Heiress) had shown. Catherine, the plain daughter of the rich Dr. Sloper, is courted by a shallow adventurer, Morris Townsend, abetted by her Aunt Lavinia, and steadfastly opposed by her dominating father. For some inscrutable reason the American producers cast two British actors, Albert Finney and Maggie Smith, for two of these four American characters, and employed a Polish director, Agnieszka Holland, to direct. As one would expect, Finney and Maggie Smith give excellent performances, but there were surely several American actors who would have done just as well. Maggie Smith’s character, Aunt Lavinia, has been made less interesting than in the novel, where her vicarious romantic infatuation with Townsend is largely responsible for the tragedy. In the novel she is mischievous, in the film merely comic or pathetic. There is an absurd and totally incredible scene in the film when she arranges to meet Townsend clandestinely in a low dive (it is an oyster bar in the novel) where a couple are actually having noisy sexual intercourse behind a thin, tattered curtain at her back as she talks to Townsend.
The heroine is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is completely miscast in terms of the
original novel. Catherine is described in the blurb on the back of the videotape box as “a lovely young woman.” The whole point of the story is that she is not lovely, and is entirely lacking in any other obvious charm. “A dull plain girl, she was called by critics,” says the narrator. She is not even interestingly ugly or disabled. She is “stolid,” strong and healthy. Clearly the film producers could not bring themselves to cast a genuinely plain actress. Jennifer Jason Leigh is good-looking in a rather gamine way, so to make sense of her part in the story she has to play the young Catherine as gauche to the point of imbecility. When she is introduced to Townsend at her cousin’s engagement party, she stares at him like a hypnotized rabbit, totally incapable of speech, creating an embarrassing scene. In the novel, however, the scene is described like this:
Catherine, though she felt tongue-tied, was conscious of no embarrassment: it seemed proper that he should talk, and that she should simply look at him. What made it natural was that he was so handsome, or rather, as she phrased it to herself, so beautiful. (chapter 4)
The film also fudges the character of Townsend. In that scene of their first meeting, he seems as spontaneously taken with Catherine as she is with him. In the book it is obvious from the way he artfully ingratiates himself with Catherine’s aunt on the same occasion that he is already conducting a calculated campaign to marry Catherine. The film, however, encourages us to think that he genuinely loves Catherine as well as her money. In a crucial scene in the book Dr. Sloper goes to see Townsend’s sister, with whom he is living, to try to confirm his suspicions about the young man’s true character. It’s a brilliantly written scene in which the honest woman tries not to be disloyal to her brother, but cannot in the end conceal his unscrupulousness. Her final word, wrung from her by the force of Sloper’s personality, is “Don’t let her marry him!” and it settles any lingering doubts the reader may have about Sloper’s judgement of Townsend. In the film, this line is moved forward in the scene to become part of a passage of verbal fencing: Sloper says he doesn’t consider Townsend a fit husband for his daughter, and the sister says lightly, “Then don’t let her marry him.” The climax of the scene in the film is an attack by the sister on Sloper for arrogant abuse of his power and wealth. What makes the character of Sloper so interesting is that he is absolutely right about Townsend, but absolutely wrong in the way he treats Catherine. By blurring the first point, the film turns his character into a stereotype of the repressive father.
Both the screenplay and the direction move the story relentlessly towards cinematic cliché. So when Townsend finally breaks off the relationship and drives away from the distraught Catherine in a cab, of course it happens in pouring rain and of course Catherine, running after him, falls flat on her face in the muddy street. The final scene of the film is a particularly gross travesty of the original. In the novel, some years after the engagement was broken off by Townsend, and Sloper has died, he comes back, encouraged by Aunt Lavinia, to ask for a reconciliation, but Catherine, who has not married, tells him he has hurt her too much for her to consider such a thing. Townsend leaves, and in the last few lines there is an exchange between him and Aunt Lavinia in the hall that makes it clear he is as self-seeking as ever:
“You will not despair—you will come back?” “Come back? Damnation!” And Morris Townsend strode out of the house, leaving Mrs Penniman staring.
Catherine meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.
That is the last, eloquent line of the tale. In the film, Townsend calls on Catherine when she is teaching or entertaining a large group of little children (presumably in compensation for or sublimation of frustrated maternal instincts), who are removed so that the interview can take place. Catherine declines his offer. Townsend leaves, subdued, and we glimpse Aunt Lavinia in the hall. There is no exchange of words between them. Catherine sits down at the piano; a little girl comes up and stands beside her, and smiles timidly. Catherine smiles back and continues to play. An operatic soprano sings an aria on the sound track, the background goes dark, Catherine plays on, and she gives a faint reminiscent smile. Blackout.
The Portrait of a Lady is a more interesting failure. Great things were expected of it. It was directed by Jane Campion, the Australian director of that remarkable film, The Piano. It had a mouthwatering cast: Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey, Martin Donovan, Shelley Winters, Richard E. Grant, and Sir John Gielgud. Yet it was badly received by most of the critics. Here are some review quotes I gathered from the Internet:
“It’s all surface and no depth. There’s no heart to this story . . . many of the set-ups just take too long, none of the complications inherent in the plot are shown clearly enough, none of the dialogue does enough to emphasise the real evil involved in manipulating people . . . Poor Henry James. I thought of him rolling in his grave, as I sat squirming in my seat.”
“Campion has sacrificed sense to style, leaving powerful characters only vaguely explored in a story that should be based on emotions, not looks.”
“Very little of this tragedy makes it to our hearts as a result of an inept screen adaptation, inconsistent directing, meaningless camera angles and pointless closeups.”
What went wrong? One might begin to answer that question by considering why Campion’s The Piano went right. It was a director’s film through and through. She herself wrote the script, which has relatively little dialogue (partly because the heroine is dumb) and tells a very simple story of basic emotions. The film makes its impact almost entirely by images—juxtapositions of culture and nature. Nobody who has seen the film will forget the opening scene of the piano being unloaded onto the surf-pounded beach, or the climax when the heroine in her Victorian clothing is dragged down into the depths of the sea, tethered to the piano. The Portrait of a Lady is a very different proposition: a classic novel, full of subtle psychological twists and turns, in which intense emotions are almost entirely concealed behind a surface of upper-class manners and polite conversation. The film certainly tries to be faithful to James’s novel—perhaps the screenplay, written by Laura Jones in collaboration with Campion, tries too hard in this respect. Of course they had to condense drastically, but most of the dialogue is actually James’s, and there is no significant deviation from the original story. However, Jones and Campion make spasmodic attempts to escape from this reverential approach with occasional sequences in quite different styles. The film begins with shots of a number of young women of the 1990s lying languorously around on the grass and then fades into a close-up of Nicole Kidman as Isabel—evidently a clumsy attempt to establish the “relevance” of the story to the present day. There is an erotic fantasy sequence in which Isabel imagines herself being caressed simultaneously by the three men who have at that stage been attracted to her—Ralph Touchett, Lord Warburton, and Caspar Goodwood. Isabel’s tour of the Middle East prior to her marriage to Osmond is represented by an early silent film pastiche sequence in black and white which also takes on a surrealistic, dreamlike quality. These deviations from naturalism jar both with the basic style of the film and with each other.
Some reviewers thought that John Malkovich played Gilbert Osmond as such a creepy, sinister character that it was impossible to believe that Isabel would marry him. But it has to be said that there is a certain weakness in the original novel here—James never really shows us Isabel’s moment of decision, of commitment to Osmond. We see her being quite plausibly attracted to his intelligence, culture, and polished manners; we see him call on her and make his proposal of marriage, which she does not accept or reject. She postpones an answer because she is going abroad. Osmond leaves, and James describes Isabel’s feelings thus:
Her agitation . . . was very deep. What had happened was something that for a week past her imagination had been going forward to meet; but here, when it came, she stopped. The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, no
t hoping to make it seem altogether natural. Her imagination . . . hung back: there was a last vague space it couldn’t cross—a dusky, uncertain tract which looked ambiguous and even slightly treacherous.
This “last vague space” is surely sexual, and it is not so much Isabel’s imagination that cannot cross it as James’s. He more or less admits as much, “not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.” Then there is a gap in the narrative, and the next time we see her she is engaged. There is never a moment in the text when Isabel acknowledges that she is “in love” with Osmond.
Jane Campion has attempted to deal with this problem by suggesting that Osmond casts a kind of erotic spell over Isabel. She sets the proposal scene not in a drawing room, but in the crypt of the cathedral in Florence. Isabel returns to look for her parasol, which Osmond has found. Its shadows suggest a bat’s wing. Isabel seems hypnotised as Osmond circles around her, twirling the parasol as he woos her. His final kiss (not in the novel at all) has a vampirish quality. The scene illustrates a general tendency in film adaptations of James’s novels to make explicit the erotic element that James left implicit, because sexual emotions are comparatively easy to convey by nonverbal means. In this case, though, it was a reasonable liberty to take with the given material.
The endings of James’s novels often raise problems for filmmakers because he favoured open or ambiguous endings, whereas the expectation of a classic period film, especially if it is a love story, is that it will have a closed and preferably happy ending. The fatuous ending of Washington Square, which tries to compensate Catherine for her spinsterhood with a vicarious family of adoring children, is a case in point. The film of The Portrait of a Lady is more satisfactory in this respect. In James’s novel, Caspar Goodwood makes a final appeal to Isabel to leave her hateful husband and live with him. She is tempted, but refuses. In the very last scene of the book, Henrietta Stackpole enigmatically urges Goodwood to “wait.” In the screenplay Laura Jones attempts a more affirmative, if no more cheerful, ending by making Isabel’s motive for returning to Italy an altruistic determination to protect Pansy from her oppressive father. The last scene in the screenplay—Isabel returning to the convent room where Pansy is incarcerated—is entirely invented:
