The Henry James Review

Many Jamesians will undoubtedly be offended by Jane Campion’s cinematic reinterpretation of The Portrait of a Lady, which departs from both the letter and the spirit of the novel. Campion’s version of James differs in part because she is working in a medium that replaces the complex, nuanced prose of novels with poetry that speaks directly to the eye and ear. The complex social tapestries that many novels weave remain beyond the ability of the cinema to reproduce fully both because of time considerations and because movie audiences seem to prefer the sense of intimacy they can experience by immersing themselves in the issues faced by one character rather than many. So movies usually limit themselves to a few central figures and a single protagonist. Yet at the same time, the emotional conflicts of a movie hero are hard to portray; films do not render interior views easily. To overcome this limitation in her retelling of The Portrait of a Lady Campion offers fantasy sequences and an expressive musical track to access the internal workings of Isabel Archer’s psyche. A further difference between the two media lies in their conditions of reception; unlike novels, movies are customarily viewed in dark theaters where larger-than-life images create a dream-like experience that favors stories of high emotions, especially erotic ones. So it is not surprising that Campion’s film focuses more fully than James’s novel does on the courtship and marriage of Isabel (Nicole Kidman) and Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich).

One way in which movies can represent the erotic life of a character is through the language of physicality. Thus, to play on the strengths of her medium as well as to indulge her own artistic predilections, Campion shifts the thematic thrust of James’s story from an examination of the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values to a more contemporary feminist meditation on a woman’s body and its sexuality. The director’s preoccupation with the female form was evident as early as Sweetie, her first theatrical feature made in her native New Zealand in 1989. Sweetie builds to a climax in which a grotesquely fleshy woman climbs a tree, removes her clothes, and impales herself on an iron fence post. The [End Page 184] 1990 Angel at My Table emphasizes physicality as well; in a memorable sequence near the end the overweight heroine sheds her inhibitions to indulge in a nude swim with her new lover. The erotic payoff at the heart of The Piano is also bound up in physicality, purchased as it is at the price of a finger. In an unmistakable echo of Campion’s 1993 hit, Isabel Archer, who inherits both the repressed nature and passion for music of The Piano’s Ada, remarks near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, “There was a time I would have given my little finger to have been proposed to by Lord Warburton.” This line, taken directly from the novel, relates Isabel’s affinity with Ada to a striking image of physical vulnerability.

Representations of the body abound in Campion’s Portrait. Advertisements depicted the film’s title written on a woman’s outstretched hand and a man’s arm clasping a feminine bodice; the female reaches out while the male encloses and entraps her. The film itself echoes this emphasis on the human form, especially when the action moves to Italy. Here, as Kathleen Murphy has observed, bodily suffering is suggested by such touches as the cold, marble hand of a putti that Isabel fondles after the death of her baby and the bloody crucifixion scene we glimpse behind Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey) as she weakly attempts to conceal the reasons for her visit to the convent to which Pansy (Valentina Cervi) has been condemned (33). The cost of forcing women’s bodies into constricting clothing is alluded to in the fainting spells to which more than one young girl falls prey at the ball as well as by the numerous close-ups of Isabel’s cumbersome skirts, which repeatedly impede her progress and once even allow Osmond to (literally) trip her...