Portrait of a Lady

Portrait of a Lady by Jane Campion has a very strange beginning. A
bunch of contemporary girls, photographed in black and white and grainy stills,
as if they were the fading memories, talk about love and men and kissing
and
“relationships”
and marriage over opening credits until one holds out her hand and we see
written on it (such schoolgirls with their walkmans and backpacks and slouchy
dress are always writing on themselves), in an old-fashioned script,
“Portrait of a
Lady.” It is a clever idea, but it is
not carried over into the film in any way that I can see. It is merely there as
a reminder of the fact that Jane Campion — like the mass audience she is
hoping for — finds the most striking thing about Henry
James’s masterpiece of
characterization not those things which make his heroine, uniquely, Isabel
Archer but those things which Isabel Archer shared with the rest of the
nineteenth century. It is the strangeness of all that weird formality which this
film is ultimately about.

In one way, this is a mere vulgarization of and an outrage against Henry
James, though by the end of it I think we do have something of the sense of a
greater thing in the background. As Philip Larkin wrote in his
“Lines on a Young
Lady’s Photograph
Album”—

Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate
These misty parks and motors lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

What the film lacks is the kind of self-awareness that Larkin showed when he
went on:

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won’t call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across
The gap from eye to page. . .

Such self-awareness might have saved the film from its worst excess, which is
to suggest the merely feminist reading that Isabel, played in rather lacklustre
fashion by Nicole Kidman, is just a slightly more aristocratic version of
Ibsen’s Nora, a feminist prototype who
is trapped by the norms of the oppressive patriarchy (until she summons up the
nerve to walk out) rather than by her own combination of innocence and
sentimental idealism.

Isabel speaks briefly and confusingly to Henrietta (Mary Louise Parker) about
her desire to gain “a general
impression of life” as her explanation
for refusing Caspar Goodwood (Vigo Mortensen), but we never quite see the
connection between this desire and the curious kind of vanity that attracts her
to Osmond (John Malkovich). On the contrary, we have an astonishingly crass
fantasy sequence in which she imagines herself being fondled by Goodwood, Ralph
Touchett (Martin Donovan, looking far too robust in the role of this supposedly
tubercular waif) and Lord Warburton (Richard E. Grant) all at once, and later
another of carnal imagination with Osmond. It is as if Ms Campion is trying to
insist in the teeth of everything Jamesian that
Isabel’s falling into the trap of
marriage with Osmond was ultimately all about the puritanical Victorians not
allowing her any other sexual outlet!

There is not only ideology but a kind of Antipodean cynicism about this which
is particularly ill-matched to the very American character of Isabel as James
imagined her. What saves the film from complete disaster is the fact that
Malkovich does such a good job of rendering the cynicism which really is in
James. He and Barbara Hershey almost manage to make the caricatures of Gilbert
Osmond and Madam Merle come alive, and Valentina Cervi is a lovely Pansy.
Christian Bale is also very good as her disappointed suitor, Rosier. But other
casting decisions are not so good. Mary Louise Parker is out of her
depth as the out-of-her-depth Henrietta Stackpole. Likewise the two Shelleys,
Winters and Duvall, as Mrs Touchett and Miss Osmond, have more silliness and
vulgarity about them than is required for their respective parts. John Gielgud
as Mr Touchett plays John Gielgud. Mr Grant looks too coarse and silly to be a
convincing Lord Warburton, but that impression may be owing to fresh memories of
his Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Trevor
Nunn’s Twelfth Night.

The film is not without its successes. Miss Campion does make us see, I
think, how Osmond is able to seduce Isabel with her own virtues without making
her seem merely vain. Ralph, as the occasional spokesman for what remains of
James in the movie says to her: “The
world interests you, and you want to throw yourself into it.
Don’t repudiate it;
it’s very
fine.” Yet in a way this
“fine”
quality in her character is just the other side of that which Mrs Touchett
refers to when she says that Isabel
“is quite capable of marrying him for
the beauty of his opinions or his autograph of
Michaelangelo.” There is a kind or
archetypal, male-female character to this matchup of innocence and experience, a
more refined version of the traditional paradigm in which woman looks to man as
teacher as well as protector. Of course, the subtlety and irony of it is
coarsened and cheapened in Miss
Campion’s telling by the feminist
imperative. But that it survives at all is to her credit.