Tidy Bowl

Merchant & Ivory tame Henry James

by Peter Keough

THE GOLDEN BOWL. Directed by James Ivory. Written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based on the novel by Henry James. With Uma Thurman, Kate Beckinsale, Jeremy Northam, Nick Nolte, Anjelica Huston, and James Fox. A Lions Gate Films release. At the Avon.

Braziers flame on the murky palazzo steps as the prince's guards ascend to their bloody purpose. Entwined naked in bed are the prince's 16-year-old son and the prince's new wife, the boy's stepmother, who's twice his age. They are dragged, screaming for their lives, down to the dungeon to be put to . . .

Wait a minute, this isn't Henry James. It is, however, Merchant Ivory, who begin their yawning adaptation of The Golden Bowl with this variation on the classic "Now that I've got your attention" opening. The bodice-ripping scene is an enactment of a story told by Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam) to Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman) about an ill-fated Renaissance ancestor. A harbinger of things to come? No such luck.

James is the epitome of the tell-don't-show school of narrative, which reaches its rarefied heights in this, his last novel, a masterpiece -- or nightmare -- of refined sensitivity and second-guessing, abstractions of abstractions and page-long sentences that suddenly end with a question mark and you have no idea why. Which poses a problem for any filmmaker, since film is all surface. Merchant Ivory's solution? Fill all that windy space with furniture. Gorgeous stuff: paintings and statuary and baronial estates and famous actors who look and act like expensive furniture. Merchant Ivory have turned James's novel into the film equivalent of the knickknack of the title: a crystal bowl so gilt that it's glittery and opaque and would hurt your foot if you dropped it.

It is, however, damned pretty to look at. And to their credit, director James Ivory screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have extracted a serviceable 130-minute story from James's tome. It's England 1903, and the impoverished Prince Amerigo is engaged to marry Maggie Verver (Kate Beckinsale), sole scion of -- as a subtitle worthy of the coffee-table book this film could be mistaken for informs us -- "Adam Verver: America's first billionaire" (Nick Nolte). Charlotte Stant, meanwhile, is pissed, and she connives to get her ex-flame the prince help her pick out a gift for the wedding. She fancies the golden bowl, but it has a flaw, and she doesn't buy it. Mr. Verver buys Charlotte, however, and makes her his wife, pretty much as he bought the prince for Maggie, and tons of European artwork for his planned grand museum in America.

Not bad: 200 pages of verbal hand wringing out of the way in about 10 minutes. But now for the hard part. Charlotte and the prince still have the hots for each other, and Adam and Maggie are as close as a father and daughter can be and still be published in the early 20th century. More important, however, than who wants who is who knows what. Maggie and Adam didn't knew of their spouses' previous relationship -- or did they? Do they know that it has resumed? And Charlotte and the prince don't know that Maggie and Adam don't know -- or do they? This goes on for many pages and can cause eyestrain.

So can the film's manner of handling this subtle interplay of knowledge and power, point of view and objective truth. Merchant and Ivory espouse the spraying-seltzer-bottle school of psychological subtlety: party guests sliding down staircases on silver salvers, a Nijinsky-esque ballet, a kinetoscopish montage derived perhaps from Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady. And, of course, the Oscar-winning costumes and set design.

Neither do the actors manage to get beyond the giant Titianesque frescoes of gamboling divinities or the monumental statuary looming over them. Jeremy Northam comes off like a fine British actor suffering through a beard and a bad accent. At times it seems he's about to turn into Roberto Benigni, especially when Adam tells him how he almost removed the sweetbreads of a bounder ogling his first wife. That's Nick Nolte for you; he brings a physical menace to the book's wispy Adam that is oddly appropriate. Uma Thurman's Charlotte has moments of poignant desperation but mostly looks tired. And Kate Beckinsale does her best to make Maggie unattractive.

The best performances come from Anjelica Huston and James Fox as Fanny and Colonel Assingham. Poor Fanny is the matchmaker who sets up this ménage à quatre and then tries to figure it out. As such she is the voice of attempted clarity for the beleaguered reader of the book. For the viewer, Huston's earthy Southern accent and Fox's dour bemusement offer much needed irony and humanity.

They are endearing cracks in the perfection of James's inhuman masterpiece and the film's surface of gimcracks. Like the bowl itself, James's novel was a cold display of craft, genius, and opulence. The Merchant Ivory knockoff is merely flawed and bogus.