The Golden Bowl (2001)

As a critic who won't even pretend that I can get any pleasure out of late Henry James (those sentences drape themselves around my brain like soft yet suffocating prose pillows), I'll humbly sidestep the question of how faithful The Golden Bowl is to the most notoriously baroque of all James novels. What I will say is that the movie, stripped of the swoony, gelatinous density of James' language, stands, ironically, as a watchable but rather bare-bones entry in the Merchant Ivory canon.

The early sections, in which the lovely expatriate Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman) and the vaguely sleazy Italian aristocrat Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam), poor but in love, marry themselves off to wealthy mates who happen to be father and daughter, are tantalizing in their perverse evocation of incest. This quartet is headed for a crash. Yet the moment that Adam Verver (Nick Nolte), the elegant and stuffy billionaire art collector, begins to suspect that Charlotte, his wifely possession, is closer than she implies to the man who is now her quasi-stepson, the revelations arrive in a way that's as cut-and-dried sordid as anything on Passions.

Thurman, in a fine performance, pierces the heart of Charlotte's fear and rage, as Verver, like a passive Charles Foster Kane, plots to make her a prisoner in her own marriage. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's script, however, is almost too obsessed with squeezing the material into a tidy three-act shape. Some of the key relationships are left naggingly abstract, notably the one between Verver and his daughter, the loyal, moist-hearted Maggie (Kate Beckinsale). It's hard to shake the feeling that what we're seeing in the rarefied mediocrity of The Golden Bowl is the sunset of a genre. We've all gawked at these castles and costumes, heard these teacups rattle once too often, but, more than that, it's the proverbial theme — the tug-of-war between love and money, spirit and survival — that appears as worn as old tweed. There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house.