THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

A masterpiece and one of the greatest of all literary adaptations as well as one of the most beautiful of all period pictures. Laura Jones did the screenplay from Henry James' novel but "The Portrait of a Lady" belongs, really, to its director Jane Campion and her extraordinary cast. Its themes are manifold; Americans abroad, the cruelty or just the impossibility of love, greed, misogyny and it's the most explicit visualisation of James on screen. 'Washington Square's here but so, too, is Laclos' 'Les Liaisons dangereuses' as young heiress Isabel Archer, (Nicole Kidman), is put into harm's way in the form of unscrupulous and manipulative artist Gilbert Osmond, (John Malkovich), by the machinations of the scheming Madame Merle, (Barbara Hershey).

All three players are quite magnificent particularly Kidman and Hershey. Campion has always been one of the greatest directors of women and here is no exception and they are surrounded by a superb supporting cast that includes Martin Donovan, Mary-Louise Parker, Richard E. Grant, Shelley Winters, Shelley Duvall, Viggo Mortensen, Christian Bale and John Gielgud, all chosen not for their ability to bring star quality to their roles but for their ability to inhabit them while, naturally, it is a gorgeous looking picture although again, never conventionally pretty for its own sake.


It's certainly not an 'easy' film, of course; the pace is slow, the dialogue heavily Jamesian and it runs for two and a half hours but it holds you in a vice-like grip. It wasn't 'a hit'; audiences didn't embrace it in the way they embraced, say, "The Piano" or Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence" which it does resemble but this is a much darker film, much more cruel. There are no really sympathetic characters and that includes the foolish and fool-hearty Isabel. In the end, it's not a film you might like but it is, as I've said, a masterpiece.