Jane Campion is surely one of the most impressive talents to have arrived on the cinematic scene in the last ten years. She is a complete filmmaker: her images are exciting and literate; her stories original and absorbing. Her first three features—Sweetie, An Angel at my Table and The Piano —together memorably showed not just great promise but the arrival, fully-formed, of a tremendous contemporary cinematic artist. So why then did she go and try to film Henry James’ virtually unfilmable novel The Portrait of a Lady?
The cheerless result of this attempt arrives in video stores this week, and it is not a happy sight. Sumptuously mounted, (so much devotion and hard work goes into the visual design and art direction of any period film that to criticize is to feel the crunch of innocent spines under your boots), decently cast and intelligently presented, Portrait is nevertheless so complete a failure that it leads you to question the idea of adapting classic novels to the screen at all. If Jane Campion can’t get under the skin of a great book, who can?
Or perhaps the real question is, why try? Those books generally regarded as world’s great novels have never made the world’s greatest movies, and adaptations of classics have never proven to be any director’s best work. In 1992 Sight and Sound magazine polled 200 critics and filmmakers to draw up their list of the 200 or so greatest films ever made, and precisely two were (loose) adaptations of classics: Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight—based, respectively, on Conrad and Shakespeare.
The urge to adapt classic novels to the screen is a habit that filmmakers fall into and out of periodically, and lately we seem to have been through a flood stage. Adaptation has usually been a reaction against the cinema of the day by someone who wants to be literate and respectable—something like Samuel Goldwyn’s production of Wuthering Heights comes to mind, as does as the entire career of James Ivory. (The only thing necessary to note about the parade of recent Jane Austin adaptations is that none of them have made particularly compelling movies. They have been stolid, safe entertainment for those weary of the Die-Harding of Hollywood, or people who might have read the books if reading were less work.)
But Campion’s attempt at adapting James smacks of a more reckless agenda. Given the constraints of a theatrical feature—that is, telling a story in visual terms in no more than about two hours—you should film a classic only when you know it will make a good movie. (This is often not much more than picking the right dead white guy to adapt: Kipling makes good movies; Henry James doesn’t.) Campion is after tougher game: she desperately wants to put across to the viewer what she got out of a memorable book. “If only I could make a movie out of this,” she must have thought, and with that impulse Jane Campion regressed from a filmmaker into an evangelical reader.
To allow reader aesthetics to overpower hard-nosed filmmaker logic like this and try and film the unfilmable is to inevitably court viewer bewilderment: People who read the novel will think that the book was better; people who didn’t read it won’t be able to figure out what the hell you’re after. Campion surely must have anticipated this. Or perhaps she didn’t: I have a friend whose ambition is to transfer great works of literature to the screen. She has never seen a good movie made from a book she has liked. She still thinks it a viable ambition.
Last year’s Jane Eyre was not so obviously the work of an evangelical reader, but the unfilmability is similar, even though as one of literature’s great dysfunctional romances it seems tailor-made for the 90’s. The abused title character is locked up in an attic by her Aunt Hideous and then packed off to the Tuberculosis School for Orphans. Here she spends years so wretched that by the time she’s ready to enter the workforce she’s unable to express any emotion whatsoever. She gets tangled up with the master of Dismal Mansion, who also has cold coffee running through his veins, and a terrible family secret scrabbling about in the attic. When he finally proposes to her you expect him to say something like “darling, won’t you be my enabler?”
But there are only one or two ways you can translate material like this into even remotely cinematic terms. First, you can abandon fidelity with the novel, give it to David Cronenberg and go for the psychotic love story to end all psychotic love stories. Or—if you prefer that your project make back it’s investment—you can do what the producers did here and give it the Suffering Brad Pitt treatment—Legends of the Fallen.
As such, it’s terminally underpowered: as with Portrait, most of the important action is internal—things there that the characters can’t express but that the narrative voice of a novel can reveal. Director Franco Zeferelli can show nothing more than surfaces, which are mute and truncated: major emotional moments pass so quickly that only somebody raised on a steady diet of TV commercials could really be moved by it. The final product is neither good Bronte, nor good cinema.
And unfortunately, that’s the choice awaiting the filmmaker who wants to adapt a classic: you can make either a bad paraphrase of a novel or a good movie. Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady is a bad paraphrase of a novel, and you have to hope that it’s failure kills that evangelical reader within her and drives her back to her regular job—making good movies.
—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996
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