Golden Bowl, The (2000)

reviewed by
JONATHAN F RICHARDS


IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE GOLDEN BOWL
A Merchant/Ivory production
With Nick Nolte, Uma Thurmond
Grand Illusion   R     130 min.

In the rich, dense world of Henry James, tension between Europe and America hangs like cigar smoke in a parlor, penetrating and clinging to every fabric, flavoring and corrupting the very air. Europe is old, calculating, saturnine, and devious; America is young, naEFve, rich in = material wealth and impoverished in taste and judgment. In The Golden Bowl, James's last novel, these lines are clearly drawn, and then blurred with deft and subtle strokes.

There is nobody better suited to the Jamesian vision than the team of producer Ismael Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. They tackled his works twenty years ago in The Europeans and The Bostonians, with middling success, but since then they've hit their stride, fashioning some of their greatest works out of E.M. Forster (A Room With a View, Howard's End). Now they've turned back to James again, and this time they're ready.

The visual beauty of The Golden Bowl is breathtaking. Under the eye of cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, the images are steeped in the paintings of John Singer Sargent and spread across the screen in rapturous elegance. We expect no less of Merchant-Ivory, but this talent is both a blessing and a curse; "that the visuals would be sumptuous was a foregone conclusion," sniffs one critic, and their detractors like to dismiss their work as "Masterpiece Theater", which somehow takes on a derogatory connotation.

The story is introduced with a grisly tale: a 17th-century nobleman discovers his young wife in bed with his grown son, and the adulterous couple is brutally executed. The tale is told by Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam), the 20th century scion of the now-impoverished (by princely standards) family, to Charlotte (Uma Thurman), his American lover. Sadly, she's poor too, and to refill the family coffers he's about to marry her best friend, Maggie (Kate Beckinsale), daughter of America's first billionaire Adam Verver (Nick Nolte). Maggie doesn't know Amerigo and Charlotte know each other. Fond as Charlotte is of Maggie, she's fonder of the prince, and doesn't mean to allow a thing like his marriage to interfere with her pleasure. When Charlotte and Adam are thrown together and Adam proposes, it knits the four of them into one big and briefly happy family.

But the Americans are not the easy dupes the Europeans take them for (Charlotte is American but she thinks like a European, complicating things even more.) As they begin to wise up, a mesmerizing pattern of strategy, protection, and chilling retribution emerges. None of the four principal characters are bad, but all are flawed. The story is rife with duplicity, obsession, repressed incest, and ill-gotten gains.

Subtle, intelligent acting by the six principals (including Angelica Huston and James Fox) takes the characters and the story beyond the surface a movie's timetable affords. Particularly good are Thurman's reckless Charlotte and Nolte's frighteningly powerful Adam Verver, a man whose immense wealth and taste clothe the brutal sinews of the man who acquired them. Verver has amassed a fabulous collection of European art by the brute force of his money and intellect; and by brute force he intends to stuff them down the throats of an uninterested American public by building them the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Merchant and Ivory set the stage so lushly we feel the silks and brocades against our skin and breathe the air of fin-de-siE8cle = European elegance. Jhabvala, who can dissect a classic novel and extract its central nervous system like a surgeon, has done a beautiful job of it here.

The golden bowl of the title makes several fatefully-timed appearances in the story. It is an exquisite piece of gilt crystal, but the gilding conceals a crack; and by the bowl's final appearance, the metaphors and double-entendres are swarming like swallows on a spring day in Capistrano. It's one of the few flaws in an otherwise exquisite piece, but the gilding is so masterful one hardly need take offense.


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