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THE GOLDEN BOWL
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As THE GOLDEN BOWL opens, impoverished though honorable Italian prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam), though passionately in love with impecunious tempestuous Charlotte (Uma Thurman), is set to marry winsome delicate Maggie Verver (Kate Beckinsale, last seen dodging Zeroes in PEARL HARBOR, but don't hold that against her), the only daughter of widower American coal tycoon Adam Verver (Nick Nolte, enunciating his polysyllables with a disconcerting growl).
Verver, presumably once a robber baron (an amalgam of Hearst, Rockefeller, and Carnegie), is now a verveless plutocrat, capturing European artistic treasures for the museum he is building in pseudonymous American City. Adding to the beauties he will acquire so as to appreciate them in private, Verver is marrying Charlotte. But as she lusts for Amerigo, she persuades him — and their mutual friend Fanny Assingham (Anjelica Huston, delivering a fine performance except when her Southern accent goes awry like a spirit-gum mustache) — into a tacit vow of silence. Once married, she subtly rearranges who spends time with whom, moving ever closer to her opportunities to rekindle Amerigo's passion for her.
If ever an author wrote between the lines, it was Henry James, for whom only banality could be said because reality must always be unsaid. Not only do his characters seldom vocalize what they are thinking — because to speak would be to acknowledge, and that would be too painful — the author himself leaves his themes symbolically overt. The Golden Bowl itself is perfect flawless crystal except that "it has a crack in it," as discerning Amerigo remarks after a casual glance. Without ever being so gauche as to state it, James asks, Where does infidelity begin? With the deed, the thought, or the desire? And if the thought is discovered or the desire felt, is the purity of love betrayed even if, like a hairline crack in a golden bowl, it is entirely invisible? And who is first unfaithful, Charlotte with her Amerigo or Maggie and Adam, their mutual Electra-complex absorption in one another an unhealthy contrast to Adam and Charlotte's chilly formality or even Maggie and Amerigo's distant mutual doting on their sailor-suited principino?
A social eunuch in the harem of irony that was Victorian and Edwardian England, James wrote with scalpel-like precision of a world where everything is conveyed even as nothing is said. Essential to his stories is the slow development of nuance, the reader's dawning awareness of profound torment under perfect calm. Such an author resists translation into movies. Cinema's visual medium can wonderfully capture time and place — scads of description telescoped into a single establishing shot of horseless carriages, Gibson-girl high-necked lace dresses, and crimson damask drapery. Stories built around language or inner monolog seldom survive their transplantation, their stories oversimplified (THE NAME OF THE ROSE), parodied (CATCH-22), or voiceovered (BLADE RUNNER).
Merchant are Ivory are as incapable of delivering a bad movie as Jerry Bruckheimer is of making a good one, but in their way, both PEARL HARBOR and THE GOLDEN BOWL substitute form (exquisite period details are the culture vulture's special effects) for substance. Adapting THE GOLDEN BOWL for the screen, Merchant Ivory elected to make explicit what James never would, from an opening prolog of a sixteenth-century prince being cuckolded by his son to showing us Charlotte and Amerigo thrashing breathlessly about a pub hotel room floor. By violating the hypnotic silences of James' last and most internalized novel, they coarsen the story, leaving us wonder how so many good actors (only Thurman is out of tune) can combine to produce so remote a movie.