SURELY Henry James would have deeply relished this variant on his great theme - would have liked it that a comprehensive revenge has been taken on a patronising Europe, which thinks it owns the "classics," by the New World. The cast of splendid American actors in Portrait of a Lady, its Australian star, and its marvellous director from New Zealand, bring a passionate energy to the story of Isabel Archer's betrayal which wipes every Jane Austen and every E.M. Forster, and every George Eliot adaptation there has ever been right off the screen.
This is the one that isn't tasteful". This one swirls its way with Isabel Archer through dramas of love and hatred, sickness and health, beauty and badness, large hope and the most bitter regret. It pins the viewer to the seat. At the end, as the music swells to match the one true kiss in the film, the viewer, like Isabel, is wracked.
Portrait of a Lady is in the line of the great romantic movies - the Brief Encounters, the Gone With the Winds - the ones where the heart stays in the cinema even though the body has had to re enter the pallid world outside. But with the difference that this one is based on a great, not a trivial, book. Henry James put in everything there is here: that kiss, for instance, alike white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed..." He put in a great deal more that is not here. But oh! there's enough in this Portrait for a wonderful movie.
Films are physical and immediate in a way books can't be. This secret man, Henry James, about whose own encounters with other bodies nothing revealing is known, gave Jane Campion the hints to which her eroticism so richly responds. Sometimes there is passion. Caspar Goodwood is beautiful. Isabel's body language with him is uniquely young and light. When he touches her cheek, early on, she repeats his touch to herself until she slides into a polymorphous dream of being fondled by all the men who surround her.
In the end, in the snow, within the cold embrace of the tree where we met her when she was young and it was leafy green, Caspar touches a wisp of her hair, like an equal. Their kiss is everything there should have been. Too late. In a crypt in Rome John Malkovich lured her with a knowing kiss, a toying kiss, and that kiss becomes entwined with everything in the world when - wide eyed with the memory of it - she tours the world to flee him. And then there are the heartbreaking kisses - the little, speaking kisses that she lavishes on her dying cousin Ralph. "Remember this," he manages to say, in a line which is one climax of the book, "that if you've been hated you've also been loved. Ah but, Isabel - adore!" No wonder the film opens with nubile girls and what they dream about kissing.
ISABEL is sobbing too hard, almost, to hear Ralph. Just as Ralph coughs, really, loudly - as his consumption - gets worse. Just as Malkovich's Gilbert Osmond shows his contempt for human emotion in sudden physical parodies; a parody of laughing, a parody of tender wiping away of tears, and a parody of kissing. He parodies his own ensnaring kiss, in the scene where he musters all his force to break his wife. In the book, as in the film, Isabel, accuses her husband of trying to "stupefy" her. Jane Campion takes advantage of this word to have Osmond physically sadistic to Isabel - placing her on high cushions where he can easily slap her, tripping her, as she passes, in absolute loathing.
Isabel hangs her bewildered forehead on the wall. Madame Merle almost smashes a wall of precious objects, in impotent rage. Faces stream with tears, hands curl, feet spin down from the steps of carriages, dogs are clasped, horses snort in the stables where Ralph and Isabel open to each other, her nose reddens, his skin breaks up. This thingness, this bodiliness, the book does not have, just as the film does not have the sheen of James's reflective commentary.
A lesser director might not have dared make the bodies and things and places of Portrait of a Lady so tactile. But Jane Campion understands James. He is not the mincing moralist of vulgar legend. He is at least as sinewy as she wants him to be. He loses nothing by what Jane Campion does to his creation. Look what she makes of the scene where Isabel first comes upon Madame Merle, when she is playing "something of Schubert's" on the piano. Look what the director makes of Schubert, in general, in this romance of the deathly and the maidenly. Look how fine casting, illuminates James' intentions. Can anyone see Barbara Hershey, stumbling backward, drenched as an animal, into one of Jane Campion's all black frames, and not think better about what Madame Merle has been, and how one pays for what one has been?
And yet the book will wait calmly there, for the next reader and the next, far too serene and spacious to be subsumed by Jane Campion's visualisation - her palazzi and greenswards, her convent cells and exquisite drawing rooms. Isabel Archer contains Nicole Kidman's clean limbed, anemone mouthed optimism; she also contains whatever any other gifted actress might bring to the part. There are ways and ways of reading the relationships between men and woman in the book some, not all, have been emphasised by Jane Campion.
James said, in the last line of his introductory essay to Portrait of a Lady, "there is really too much to say". Luckily, this didn't daunt the ensemble who made this terrific film. It's an essay on the book, not the book. But it is a complete film.