FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Draw near, world-weary PBS subscribers! Give us your well dressed, your overeducated, your sensitive guys named Chad - rouse your auto-mobiles and alight to your local motion picture-cinema! Hollywoodland has graced us with another fine literary Helena Bonham Carter film, The Wings Of The Dove.
And I declare it the doily-and-teacup picture of the year.
Iain Softley's adaptation of Henry James' classic novel - thankfully shunning the stuffy Merchant Ivory formula (and the original novel) - cares less about repression and moral ambiguity and more about who's shagging who. Or, rather, who's shagging whom. It might not win any friends in the English faculty, but it does make for a (gasp!) entertaining movie, full of great costumes, fine performances and gorgeous scenery, marred only by the occasional flashy camera technique that sticks out like an Idahoan tourist on the cote d'azure.
Here's the Coles Notes:
Bonham Carter, usually cast as the ivory-skinned virgin waif, gets to play the ivory-skinned, manipulative, lusty Kate - she's a moody, complex figure, and Bonham Carter runs with the role. Stuck between the two worlds of her middle-class upbringing and her adopted upper-class lifestyle (and running short on cash), she convinces her lover Merton (played with suave, scene-stealing understatement by Linus Roache, who you may remember from last year's sweeping victory in the World's Worst Actor Names competition) to seduce Millie, her rich, dying American friend. That way, when Millie dies, they're sure to inherit her fortune. But alas, true love, jealousy and betrayal tears everything apart.
All fun stuff, even if it is a little simplified for the modern-day attention span.
Bonham Carter brings real depth and understanding to what could have been a mere bad-guy role, and the film is much richer for it. Unfortunately, as Millie the American million heiress, Alison Elliott never quite demonstrates why everyone is so smitten with her. It may be the performance (she waffles back and forth between incorrigible and angelic) or it may be simply a matter of pacing - Roache gets all the good lines and Bonham Carter gets all the character development scenes, and she and Merton get roughly two-and-a-half minutes of screen time to fall madly in love.
Still, The Wings of the Dove is a rare bird: a slow paced, literary film with a warm pulse.
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