The Portrait of a Lady

Jane Campion follows The Piano with Henry James, which is not the obvious next move, and she makes it less obvious still by opening in the present day. Before a single bonnet appears, young women talk, first in voiceover and then in black and white, about what it is like to be kissed. Only then do we reach England in the 1870s and Nicole Kidman’s Isabel Archer being proposed to in a garden. The Portrait of a Lady is a handsome, cold, deliberately awkward film, worth 144 minutes of a patient viewer’s evening.

Laura Jones’s screenplay keeps James’s bones: a young American with ideas and no money inherits a fortune, is pursued by three men, and chooses the one she should not. Campion is less interested in the plot than in what wanting does to Isabel. Having turned down Lord Warburton (Richard E. Grant) and Caspar Goodwood (Viggo Mortensen), Isabel lies on a bed and imagines them, and her cousin Ralph too, touching her all at once. Her tour of the world is played as a mock silent film. Most critics either admired these moments or winced at them; we did both.

Stuart Dryburgh shoots England in wet greys and greens, and Italy not in sunshine but in shadow. Osmond’s rooms in Florence are so dark that faces come out of them one feature at a time. Janet Patterson, doing both production and costume design, fills those rooms with chipped antiquities and puts Kidman in black bodices buttoned to the throat, so the woman who talks most about freedom is the most tightly laced. Wojciech Kilar’s score is grave strings and a slow pulse, and it does the emotional work the characters will not do aloud. Veronika Jenet cuts the fantasies in without warning and out again without apology.

Kidman is the reason to watch. She plays Isabel as a woman who has read about independence and has not yet tested it, bright and quick and slightly pleased with herself, and lets that brightness go out a little at a time over years. Most of it is done in the face: the mouth set, the eyes doing the arguing. Martin Donovan’s Ralph, dying by inches and in love without saying so, is the film’s warmest presence. Barbara Hershey plays Madame Merle as the most agreeable woman in Europe and lets us wonder, as Isabel does not, why. Mary-Louise Parker’s Henrietta is loud, American and right about everything. Shelley Duvall, as Osmond’s sister the Countess Gemini, is in the film for about five minutes and we wanted twenty.

Then there is John Malkovich. His Gilbert Osmond is a soft-voiced collector who talks about taste the way other men talk about money, and the trouble is that he is plainly the villain from his first line. When he follows Isabel into the ruins in Rome and declares himself under her parasol, twirling it as he kisses her, we were unsettled, which is right; we also could not see what she saw in him, which is not. Kidman has to carry the whole of Isabel’s mistake on her own, and she nearly does. By the long middle stretch in a Roman palazzo, we were impatient with her for a choice the film had not sold us, then annoyed at blaming her rather than the casting.

The Piano was about a woman who would not speak, and Campion spoke for her, loudly. Here everyone talks beautifully and almost nobody says what they mean, and Campion declines to raise her voice to help. Most critics have found the film chilly. We think the chill is the subject rather than a loss of nerve. We also think two hours and twenty-four minutes is a long time to be kept at arm’s length, and the film does not always know the difference between restraint and reluctance.

See it for Kidman, for Dryburgh’s dark rooms, and for the nerve of that opening. Watch it at home, where the gloom of the Florence scenes is a problem of your curtains rather than the projection, and where the second half can be paused for a drink.