Citizen Adam: The Latest James Ivory and the Last Henry James

I was in rapid transit between Chicago and Iowa when I caught up with the heroic if unavailing publicity efforts of Merchant Ivory Films in the promotion of their latest literary adaptation. I had, as it happens, taken the train to Chicago in part to catch an actual screening of the film, only to find that it had been outposted to the far suburbs on the day of my arrival. When, instead, the movie finally caught up with me back in Iowa City, I sat utterly alone for the first time in fifty-odd (often very odd) years of moviegoing, in a large downtown theater, exiting eventually (the film isn't short) past a disgruntled projectionist qua doorman visibly impatient with my decision to see it through. In between failed and solitary venues, I had come upon the Amtrak travel magazine's glossy picture spread of the palaces of England and Italy that were sublet by the film's production crews in order to secure a cost-efficient period splendor. No argument there. The public, however, was neither enticed in large numbers nor, in the event, smitten enough to generate word of mouth. The critics didn't help. Suffice it to say that the widely unread novel was no hook either.

Yet those few who saw the film, whatever their response, certainly encountered a finely wrought piece of artisanal work--not only gilded and crystalline but rather brittle too--in the burnished form of The Golden Bowl. I restrain myself here, unlike the numerous journalists (I've lost count) who stress the metaphor to the breaking point. No, there is not a central flaw or crack right down the middle of this cinematic artifact, a fatal cleft between effective period evocation and arch situations, or between some successful and some weak casting. Rather, there are so many diffused hairline fissures and cross-purposes that whole new patterns of fragility and tension emerge. Among them is a potentially shattering violence transferred from a lurking figuration in the novel to the twin prominence, on screen, of both narrative framing and characterization, structure and psychology. And their politics. Here is the true brunt of the update. Newly stressed in the film version, the frigid complacencies of wealth and the mechanical mediations that serve them are bound up in each other's mounting ironies as two sides of the same denaturing, life-violating coin.

James's text is certainly no stranger to the word "violence," the noun at times almost personified as a looming presence on the scene. The coincidental appearance of Prince Amerigo's former lover Charlotte Stant just when he is thinking of her "was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence" (GB 248). As so often in late James, the mission of the prose is to pad an emotional shock even while swelling its melodrama toward syntactic discharge. Further, when Amerigo's wife Maggie later waits up for him in a new dinner dress after his prolonged adulterous day with Charlotte, the chagrin this causes him has "a kind of violence beyond what she had intended" (335). The genius of James is that these instances of "violence" are in no way exaggerations. Nor is there the least whiff of hyperbole when Charlotte, reduced to a kind of docent amid her husband's reconvened art treasures, has her high, quavering voice overheard by Maggie "like the shriek of a soul in pain" (526). When the film actually literalizes this simile with her wail of desolation in the interpolated final sequence, sending her husband in from his estranged separate bedroom to patronize her into submission with promises of social conquest in America, this is by no means the only time James Ivory's treatment escalates the tacit violence of the novel.

Two rather drastic innovations in the film version can...