The producer-director team of Merchant-Ivory (not to forget writer Jhabvala) return, seventeen years after The Bostonians and twenty-two after The Europeans, to Henry James. A maturer James, and a maturer Merchant-Ivory, too. Inasmuch as it's James, it is guaranteed to have a rich, loamy, fertile situation, a variation on the author's pet theme of American innocents abroad: a pauperish Italian prince, in love with a likewise unendowed American, marries her former schoolmate for money. The forsaken lover then marries the schoolmate's widowed father -- "America's First Billionaire," buying up European art for export -- and the clandestine affair resumes under the shared roof. (Staff writers of afternoon TV soaps can but eat their hearts out.) Besides its crucial and discreetly melodramatic plot function, the titular bowl is what in some circles would be called an "objective correlative": a gorgeous gilded crystal that conceals a flaw. You don't find this kind of construction at the Sundance Institute, much less at a too-many-cooks Hollywood studio. But the usual distinction still applies: Merchant and Ivory have something in common (not their bank balances, to be sure) with the American billionaire and art collector: men of taste and aspiration but no great genius or invention. And tasteful, let's be clear, by screen standards instead of Jamesian ones. What was kept hidden in the book is now out in the open (most egregiously in an explicit hotel-room tryst), and adorned with an "action" prologue, a costume ball, an exotic dance, etc., for visual spectacle. The feeling of the thing is very different, yet the foundation is unshakable. Kate Beckinsale, once again successfully disguising her native accent, steals the show from Uma Thurman (a bit over the top), Jeremy Northam, Nick Nolte, and Anjelica Huston. And she steals it in a fashion worthy of James: with subtlety, understatement, and gradually revealed depths. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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