The Portrait of a Lady (1997, DVD)

Jane Campion squanders a lot of acting talent in her painfully slow and barely transluscent 1999 adaptation of Henry James s novel. This is Merchant-Ivory turf -- not just James s The Bostonians and The Europeans, plus the forthcoming The Golden Bowl, but their films of Forster novels and of Remains of the Day. The only Merchant-Ivory film that is not better than Portrait of a Lady is Jefferson in Paris. That is very faint praise: Portrait of a Lady is considerably better than Jefferson in Paris, and Nicole Kidman is not quite as miscast as Isabel Archer as Nick Nolte was as Thomas Jefferson..

I have something of a love-hate relationship with this film. There is so much to admire about it, but the film's flaws are highly irritating. This is one of those movies that is mediocre not by being uniformly mediocre, but by combining a lot of five-star qualities with too many one, two, or three-star elements. It's upsetting, in a way, to observe so much potential dissipated by a few bad decisions. The source story is itself a marvel of English literature (though difficult to adapt to film). The period settings and costumes are gorgeous and there are a whole string of superlative...

There's a problem with this movie, and it relates to the ironic title of this epinion, a joking critique of the movie that a friend and I came up with after seeing it. This movie is sumptuous. It's gorgeously shot. The clothes, the fabrics, the wallpaper, the bricabrac, the flowers and the weather and the light...everything is as meticulously convincing, as detail-perfect as in a Merchant-Ivory film. It's even better filmed, because Campion is keen on textural detail and symbolic color, as she's shown in all of her feature films (including Sweetie, The Piano, An Angel at My Table, all...

Jane Campion's "The Portrait of a Lady" is an intelligent yet ineffectual, emotionally detached literary adaptation of the classic Henry James novel. Set in Europe in 1881, it revolves around Nicole Kidman as an independent American heiress who becomes friends with a manipulative European woman, Barbara Hershey. Hershey introduces her to an evil American expatriate, malevolently played by John Malkovich, whom Nicole, inexplicably, decides to marry - rejecting several far-more-appealing suitors. Because of her own opportunistic, headstrong stupidity, she finds herself in a bizarre situation...