The Portrait of a Lady (1997, DVD)

There's a problem with this movie, and it relates to the ironic title of this epinion, a joking critique of the movie that a friend and I came up with after seeing it.

This movie is sumptuous. It's gorgeously shot. The clothes, the fabrics, the wallpaper, the bricabrac, the flowers and the weather and the light...everything is as meticulously convincing, as detail-perfect as in a Merchant-Ivory film. It's even better filmed, because Campion is keen on textural detail and symbolic color, as she's shown in all of her feature films (including Sweetie, The Piano, An Angel at My Table, all successes in their own way). Those previous films had one thing in common; they were about women asserting themselves and finding love and a life's direction, even in the midst of very bad examples to the contrary and chauvinistic mistreatment.

One would think that Isabel Archer (such a strong name, as symbolic as some of the others in the story by Henry James: Henrietta Stackpole, Caspar Goodwood, etc.) would be an ideal heroine for Campion. Surely, even after all her setbacks, she will eventually win out and chose a productive course for herself? Maybe she does in the book, but the film is instead all about Isabel's degradation. Her lofty dreams turn on her, all because the man she chooses for a mate, the suave and sophisticated Gilbert Osmond (inhabited by John Malkovich to maximum slimyness), is a sadist who wants her for two reasons: her money, and her innocence (which he strives to corrupt).

It's inexplicable why she puts up with such treatment, and Nicole Kidman's performance does nothing to enlighten us. She strove and fought to get this part, having to convince a skeptical Campion. Too bad she succeeded, because though she looks great in the film, she gets at nothing of Isabel's core, arriving only at a fragile masochism. You feel for her predicament, but you're at a loss to see a way out.

So apparently was Campion, who ends the film with Isabel back on a brief visit to England, stranded in the snow before a web-like tree. It's a brilliant image, as brilliant as the sunlit seduction scene when Osmond playfully pursues Isabel as they move in and out of pools of light in an Italian church catacombs. But it tells us nothing, really, other than Isabel is a fool.

Barbara Hershey is the true webspinner in the movie, a bitter widow who advises both Gilbert and Isabel on how to get together, presumably so she can watch the suffering. She was Oscar-nominated for the role, and she's quite good, playing evil so perverse that she confounds even herself.