Ismail Merchant and James Ivory's attempt at The Golden Bowl - the K2 of period adaptation - coincides with a fortuitous little burst of Henry James jokes in the movies. In Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks, our bespectacled hero's attention is directed to The Master's elegant townhouse in New York, and he muddles him up with Harry James, the band leader. And in David Mamet's State and Main, William H Macy, in a tiny, delirious moment, toys with the idea that Henry James is the third brother in a trio of Old West robbers, along with Frank and Jesse. And it is diverting to think of the massive dome of Henry James's head crowned with a stetson with six-guns at his hips, or grinning on a bandstand with a trumpet.
There are laughs to be had in putting James at odds with his own Americanness, and indeed his own prototypical modernity. But that is arguably nothing other than an extrapolation of his own life and work - and nowhere is this theme sounded more emphatically, or with more solemnity and grandeur, than in The Golden Bowl, in which American innocence once again finds itself gazing into the abyss of European experience.
Is it possible to find a cinematic equivalent for James's extraordinary sentences? For the looping, meandering phrases and thickets of syntax in which vital meanings and narrative points are concealed? If it is not, then the Merchant Ivory team, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who wrote the screenplay, have at least the satisfaction of knowing that they have made a very honourable and intelligent stab at filming one of the greatest, as well as one of the most difficult books of the 20th century. The result is a sophisticated drama for grown-ups, handsomely designed, sumptuously furnished, and featuring a really stunning performance from Uma Thurman, for whom The Golden Bowl might well turn out to be her finest hour.
Jeremy Northam plays Prince Amerigo, an Italian nobleman with a baroque and gamey lineage of plotters, intriguers and cardinals. To rescue his flagging fortunes, he makes a brilliant engagement in 1903 to Maggie Verver (Kate Beckinsale), the lovely, innocent young daughter of America's first billionaire, widower Adam Verver (Nick Nolte), a man concerned with amassing a gigantic collection of European art for a huge museum he is building back home. But Amerigo has a secret: a former mistress - although their relationship is never described so tactlessly - in the form of beautiful Charlotte Stant (Thurman), a childhood friend of Maggie's. Charlotte is passionately unwilling to surrender her relationship with the prince, and so with the prince's covert encouragement, pursues Adam and marries him.
And so the ambiguous foursome is able to continue its strange, unwholesome proximity: the prince with Charlotte, and Adam with his daughter, to whom he is fiercely attached. Each pair is aware of its own infidelity: Amerigo's with Charlotte, and Maggie's, in a sense, with Adam, a deeply loved paterfamilias whose primacy in her life she is reluctant to dissolve or supplant. It is a subtle, delicate web of deception and self-deception, in which the participants know and do not know what is going on under their noses.
The symbol for this enigma is the golden bowl itself, which Charlotte picks out as a wedding present for Maggie, and which, due to some slightly strained plot twists, finally reveals the adultery. The bowl has a secret flaw: a crack somewhere in the gilt. It is invisible, and yet the knowledge that the flaw is there spoils it as a present, and makes it an ill augury and presentiment of shame hidden within outward perfection.
It is a very Jamesian motif, faithfully preserved in spirit by James Ivory here: a baffling and even exasperating puzzle. In the film, as in the book, none of the principals ask to see where the bowl's flaw actually is, and we are never shown it in close-up, despite the air of fastidious aesthetic connoisseurship that saturates the movie. In the elusive spider's web of hinted-at emotion that James spins, the bowl does a good deal of metaphorical work in symbolising all the mysteries of the human heart. In the movie, with its explicit kisses and embraces, the bowl is less important. This is a pity.
But Uma Thurman gives a dazzling performance as Charlotte, glorying at first in her victory at appearing to have secured wealth, status and renewed access to her lover - and then increasingly distraught as these things crumble. Jeremy Northam is elegant and sinuous, but Kate Beckinsale and Nick Nolte give rather reticent, even pallid performances in comparison. That, however, is a consequence of this movie making emotional transgression so explicit, and so the wicked European and his paramour will inevitably seem more vivid.
This is a film that demands a good deal from a modern audience. They must understand its profound and mysterious sense of sin; they must understand its moral sense of marriage yet share its appreciation that adultery, if managed with sufficient discretion and taste, is not the end of the world and, indeed, that marriage and adultery can peacefully co-exist for long periods. If Nietzsche went beyond good and evil, then Henry James can be said to have gone beyond fidelity and adultery in The Golden Bowl.
In the end, James Ivory does not inhabit the book as fully as Terence Davies managed with Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and his "five years later" captions are a little jarring. But this is still a very enjoyable and perceptive film. The big Merchant Ivory costume extravaganza may be very unfashionable at the moment, but as the merit of this excellent movie dawns on everyone, I predict that the pendulum will swing back.
