British filmmaker Iain Softley has modernized the action of the Henry James novel by a very few years so as to place it more firmly in our own century, but it remains a remote spectacle in dull, drained color. The essential and ever-fresh situation (there was an unimported and updated French vulgarization of the novel, ca. 1980, starring Dominique Sanda and Isabelle Huppert, and an imaginative variation on it by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, under the title of Summer Skin, set in contemporary Argentina ca. 1960) is still perfectly discernible: the well-bred Kate Croy, barred by lack of funds and a stern guardian from marrying the man of her choice, a journalist of lofty ideals and low income, hatches a scheme to hook him up with the terminally ill Millie Theale, an American heiress having no heirs of her own. This would promptly remove the major obstacle to the lovers' union; the other, the new obstacle would remove itself soon enough. (No one understood better than James the importance placed on Money in the pursuit of happiness, and no one hampered that pursuit with knottier plot complications, murkier ambiguities, stiffer moral fiber.) Softley generates some tingly moments in the pivotal episode in which Kate (Helena Bonham Carter, who else?) insinuatingly lays out the plan in front of her nonmaterialistic beau (Linus Roache), but the filmmaker's emphasis throughout -- perhaps an indicator of his own small-mindedness -- is lopsidedly on these co-conspirators. The target of their designs never comes sharply into focus as a person, only as a plot device. (No fault of the able actress, Alison Elliott, with her Medieval-princess chasteness and fragility, her Pre-Raphaelite paleness and frizziness.) The full magnificence of this character, the near saintliness with which she succumbs to her victimization, is unregistered on screen, and the inner torments of her predators are reduced in proportion. The movie offers only stick-figure sketches of the shaded portraits on the page. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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