THE BREACH BETWEEN HENRY JAMES’S NOVELS AND MOVIES

María Antonia ALVAREZ

Distance Teaching University, Madrid

The use of the classics is inundating the scene, but does it mark a renewed fervour for great literature or simply a failure of imagination? Henry James would have been surprised by his sudden popularity. The most famous directors are turning to his works looking for story ideas for their movies, but they can look upon the texts both, as sacred, or impose their own vision upon the original plot.

James's fiction devoted long passages to the ruminations of his characters, catching them at the moment before they made a decision or performed an action, being his introspective style, and his involving and original plots a challenge for film directors; thus the difficulty to translate them to the screen, though there are some exceptions. According to Rafael Shargel, Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller and Francois Truffaut’s The Green Room“ handle James with greater subtlety, and overall are more effective” (1997:32), than the four new films: The Wings of the Dove, The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square and The Golden Bowl, which reduce their protagonists to a woman as an essentially emotional creature, while in the novels it is important but no more than their intellectual and ethical integrity.

Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller (1974) shows a reverential attitude toward the literary masterpiece and produces a rich vision in the screen of Henry James's novella. According to Peggy McCormarck, "along with Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans, the film is one of the most interesting adaptations of the nineteenth-century American text" (2002:47). The movie succeeds at portraying Daisy as an independent subject, while cultural forces pull at her as Continental norms of behaviour which conflict with her American, democratic way of being and with her unformed but undeniable feminist spirit, since she "never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do" (DM 57).

The question of Daisy Miller's innocence is clarified in the film, bringing the audience closer, while James deliberately never allows the reader inside Daisy's consciousness: her story is told through a third person omniscient narrator, Winterbourne, whose description and interpretation are derived from his limited knowledge of the American girl. In the film it is effectively dramatised his perplexity as he struggles to identify a category into which he could mentally place Daisy; a task he fails until after her death when Giovanelli tells him by her grave that "she was ... the most innocent ... young lady I ever met" (DM 92).

Truffaut's The Green Room (1978), an adaptation of Henry James's "The Altar of Dead" shows that a story that is altered for the cinema can remain faithful to the spirit of the novel if its sense is retained. Both, in Truffaut's film and in James's short story, the main theme is the obsessive desire to keep the past alive in memory, but the problems of memory can also be problems of desire, and in spite of the importance of respecting the dead, this respect can become an obsession that can poison the present.

Since in James's style things are never said directly and Truffaut could not allow himself to be so vague and unclear in the screen, he had to draw materials for his film from other two of James's best short stories: "The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Friends of Friends". He also changed the setting of the drama to present the viewer his nostalgic vision of James's specter of death, and from London he moved to a small French town, ten years after the First World War. According to Matthew F. Jordan, this new setting supplements the story in some important ways since, the film serves allegorically as a cultural lesson for France:

By adapting the action of James's story to 1920s rural France, Truffaut links Davenne's personal loss to a collective trauma, France's loss of a generation to the First World War. In doing so, the film serves an important function in the construction of a French national cinema and cultural consciousness: it speaks to problems of memory stemming from a shared experience. (2002:77)

For other critics, there are different readings of Truffaut's film. Priscilla L. Walton sees the complications of James's gender constructions exemplified here, basing her statement in the fact that beside the portrait of the protagonist's wife hung in the chapel of the deceased people who have affected him deeply, the audience can see the portraits of Marcel Proust, Henry James and Oscar Wilde: "The placement of Proust, James, and Wilde, here, in contrast with Julien's dead wife, invites de viewer to reassess Julien's devotions, for it suggests a homoerotic triangle, in which women perform homosocially--or as conduits for male same-sex desire" (2002:70). The director himself plays the obsessed central character, "self-appointed guardian of the memory of the dead against the amnesia of the world", with an emotional restraint that "allows this sombre film to make its powerful effects" (Horne, 2000:48).

James was obsessed with the inner life of his extremely well drawn characters; the stream-of-consciousness technique and the elliptical, though expressive, dialogue, were some basic aspects of his introspective style in order to develop those involving, obscure plots. But, has Polish-born director Agnieszka Holland’s new version of Washington Square (1997) captured James’s spirit? If we compare this film to William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) --where Olivia de Haviland won an Oscar for her portrayal of Catherine Sloper, the shy and plain rich girl, supported by Ralph Richardson as her imperious father and Montgomery Clift as her sinuous and ambiguous suitor Morris Townsend-- the result is that Holland fails to delineate the characters’ internal complexity. She, and screenwriter Carol Doyle, have given James a feminist version and have turned what in the first heroine was “simplicity and shyness into an overgrown girl who consistently makes a fool of herself”, because she “dramatises her heroine’s dilemma as a physical, not a psychological, problem” (Shargel, 1997:33).

For Henry James the real drama lay not in crucial events but in specific moments. In this subtle novel he emphasises the claustrophobic domesticity of his heroine's household and economic standing, while composing interesting tableaux, as dark and rich as still-life paintings: Morris abandons Catherine and it marks her forever, but when her suitor drives off she neither runs after the carriage through the muddy street nor falls headlong in the mud, as we watch in the movie. And when Catherine discovers that her father "is not very fond of me" her love for him disappears, she does not change her behaviour, but her only reaction when he is dying is to let him know that she cannot promise never to marry Morris, even though it costs her in his will.

An adaptation of the same novel, written by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, has also succeeded as a Broadway play in 1995. It would take an exquisite sensibility to appreciate all the ironies of James's prose, and audiences do no have the patience to endure subtle, psychologically indirect interchanges between characters, or complex relationships. Perhaps for this reason, he never received the audience's applause he longed for so deeply during the five years of his career --from 1889 to 1994-- that he dedicated to the theatre, which were very important for his career as a writer of prose. James never recovered from the public rejection of his play Guy Domville and, as he has promised, he stopped trying to be a dramatist and published all the plays he had written in the volume Theatricals. Nevertheless, a century later, it took writers of smaller talent to make James's characters come alive onstage.

Holland's version ignores the Goetzes' ending, with Townsend vainly banging on the Sloper front door as Catherine icily listens within and then goes back up the stairs. The new conclusion, with the girl sending the man packing --after a short conversation inside the house-- is less powerful and robs the story's ending of its quietly stated force. Thus, despite dramatising more scenes from the novel, the new movie does not do half so good a job at capturing its spirit.

The director Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), based on James’s most famous novel The Portrait of a Lady (1888) shows “a relatively overt violence and sexuality which does not satisfy Jamesians, but employed just the right dosage of sensation in particular instances to elucidate the quality of a person or relationship” (Aleva, 1997:2). The film also presents a highly coloured heroine, since Campion considered the author a pioneer in feminist issues.

According to Adeline R. Tintner, the novelist's detachment from sex and women had two profound effects: “he could encounter a young female without feeling or experiencing the sexual excitement usual in such meetings, and he could look at her with admiration, if she was beautiful, but the admiration was cool and the ardour intellectual.” (1986:xvii) The result was one of her more strong, attractive, moving characters, and, for all these singular characteristics, the Australian director Jane Campion--who made her reputation with The Piano—was tempted to give The Portrait of a Lady a decidedly feminist reading, but as Leslie Alan Horvitz declares, “it only takes a few minutes for Campion to sabotage the story that James was trying to tell, and that kind of betrayal is not easy to forgive.” (1997:38) Brian D. Johnson also thinks that the director fails to get behind the eyes of the heroine, although he admires the way Campion directs, with “a slow, stately rhythm, as if creating a visual counterpart for the expansive luxury of James’s prose”, while her camera “dwells on costume and architecture, swooping from the piazzas of Florence to the Coliseum in Rome.” (1997:69) And Alleva considers that in some ways, the Australian director’s “dreamy, sub-aqueous style is a good equivalent of James’s prose, though she lacks his deadpan sarcasm.” (1997:1)

James had described his heroine as a pretty twenty three-year-old American girl, who has come to live with her aunt and uncle in England after the death of her parents. She “had everything a girl could have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses.” Her three admirers would have satisfied any girl in her time: a gentle soul, her cousin Ralph Touchet—who loved Isabel to the point to share his father’s large legacy with her, but was ill with consumption. The aristocratic and rich Lord Warburton—who would have permitted her to reach the top level in society, but was too conventional for her, hungry for experience as she was. The classical successful American young man Caspar Goodwood—who was too much in love with her, but menaced her idealistic and romantic idea of freedom.

After declining all of them, Isabel blindly chooses a snob and treacherous dilettante, “an old mixture of the detached and the involved”; the fortune hunter Gilbert Osmond, who has a daughter but--as Henry James tells us--has “no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort.” James L. Babin suggests that in the attitudes and character of Gilbert Osmond, James “attacks the aesthetics of Pater's philosophy. Osmond refuses to address moral questions in art. In his indolent, languid world weariness, he perverts the concept of life as art by his narrow interpretation of art as mere surface, the substance without the shadow, form for its own sake” (1977:100).

In spite of Osmond’s cruelty to Isabel, she does not admit her mistake and “affronts her destiny”. James painted Isabel Archer’s portrait without the intervention of physical love, since his power of observation could be free from emotional interference or passion. However, in the film we see Isabel’s frustrated sexual hunger in a dream scene in which she rolls on a bed with her suitors.

In the film Madame Merle, the mature American-born woman who has long lived in Europe and has learned from it, immediately and perfectly suggests complexity. For James L. Babin, the presence of Pater is often felt in James's fiction: “One has only to listen to the resonance of Pater's language to discover the source for those sinister, archetypal innuendoes that pervade James's portrayal of Madame Merle” (1977:100). James writes of her that she "has been a dweller in many lands, and had social ties in a dozen different countries". "I am old and stale and faded", she confesses to Isabel, "when I have to come out, and into a strong light, then, my dear, I am a horror!"

The end is controversial. In the movie, Campion leaves the spectator unknown of Isabel’s last destiny, permitting him to decide where Isabel goes and wondering whether she will indeed return to Italy, while he novel leaves the reader thinking about the meaning of her return to her husband.

James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, a masterpiece of his final period, has been the most successful of the three last movies. But, even though the script keeps the basic plot, it loses some meaning and sensibility, perhaps because the story is set after 1910, lacking the fascinating charm of turn-of-the-century period where Henry James set it. Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove (1997) is notorious for its long climactic nude scene; but it also contains “sequences of drunken, bohemian revelry, an interlude set in an opium den”, and even Raphael Shargel sees “hints of a homoerotic attraction between its two heroines” (1997:32), instead of just a deep friendship between the independent-minded Kate, wise, thoughtful and sympathetic, and Milly, the radiant American heiress.

Like much of James's early and late fiction, the novel deals with the risk of romantic manipulation, the triumph of American ardour over European perfidy, showing the hardness and cruelty that lie beneath this aristocratic society in which money is the protagonist. Although James creates many strong female characters in his fiction, Kate Croy is the most modern of his well drawn heroines, but it is the ingénue Milly, with her naive exuberance who finally controls feeling, although in Ian Softley's movie the viewer strives in vain to hear Milly's final statement. According to Marcia Iam: "Milly's wings at the end of the film are too flimsy to stretch out and cover any one ... she represents the fantasy apotheosis of American vapidity" (2000:237).

The film The Golden Bowl (2000) is the third time that the group Merchant-Ivory has tried to do Henry James and, according to Andrew O'Hagan, it is the third time that they have failed. Their versions of The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984) served to render the Jamesian aesthetic "neither in terms old or new, but rather as a pretentious, mongel sensibility" (2000:1). The Golden Bowl is based on the 1904 James novel on the same name, from Ruth Praw adaptation.

At the centre of this movie is the metaphor of the golden bowl, a beautiful piece of antique crystal that has a hidden flaw. It is also an apt symbol of the strength and weakness of this Merchant Ivory's adaptation of the novel, for it is beautiful to look at, but the film lacks the book's mystery, the dramatic power of the complexities of the love triangle and the clash between not-so-innocent Americans and wise Europeans is seriously flawed.

The performances are first-rate, especially Nick Nolte (Adam Verver) and Uma Thurman (Charlotte Stant) since Jeremy Northam (Prince Amerigo) never transmits the sexual or romantic magnetism that makes it clear why two beautiful women would fall in love for him and one of them, the daughter of a millionaire American art collector, Kate Beckinsale (Maggie Verver), marries him.

The novel retains James's psychological density, without betraying its criticism of how Americans caught the contagious charms of Europe and surrendered their democratic basics. It is a story in which everyone's morality is put to the test, even the shopkeeper's, and in which we are invited to consider how to live with knowledge and what to do with imperfection. Since Verver and his married daughter, in James's words, are left "too immensely together" Charlotte and her son-in-law are left "too immensely alone" and continue their premarital affair. But deceit goes hand-in-hand with dignity, and must not be abandoned: everyone wants to keep his gilded cage--in a plot that says less than it means--mainly Charlotte, whose husband turns the great museum he is designing into a mausoleum for her, fated to become and exhibit the collection.

Merchant-Ivory's film gives seductive shape to James's obscure prose, showing how the American collector separates Charlotte from her lover by exiling her to his country, thus saving his daughter's marriage. Generally speaking, the film did not get a positive reaction. There are just some good reviews, mainly dedicated to Uma Thurman, who emerges triumphant from this adaptation of James's exquisite-looking tale of manners, love and betrayal.

In conclusion, if we analyse the breach between a classical novel and a film made from it we must recognise that film adaptations of literary classics are often tricky and inspire as much anger as admiration. In films made from famous books, all the inventions added to the previous story to overcome the problems of vagueness or the reductions of some parts of the literary work provoke criticism from those who feel that the story is now different and even incomplete in some way. Thus, if the use of the classics is inundating the screen, in most cases it does not mark a renewed fervour for great literature but simply a failure of imagination. In the case of the last four movies on Henry James’s fiction, they would have been better films if the novels had not existed.

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