Word: bonham
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...streamlining of the book emphasizes the basically melodramatic quality, when stripped down to the essentials, of James's plot. In turn-of-the-century London, a well-bred but impoverished young woman, Kate Croy (played by the matchless Helena Bonham-Carter), is confronted with conflicting demands of a secret engagement to a penniless journalist (Linus Roache) and a wealthy aunt who wants her to marry well. Into the midst of this crisis sails Milly Theale (Alison Elliott), an ingenuous American visitor who--in true Jamesian form--happens to be encumbered with an enormous fortune. Milly becomes friends with Kate...
...highest honors, however, go to Bonham-Carter, queen of the British period piece film, who wins more sympathy for the ambiguous, ambivalent villainness Kate than perhaps James ever intended to be diverted from Milly. Bonham-Carter's Kate is alternately seductive and alienating: entrapped by circumstances, at once manipulator and manipulated, cruel and vulnerable, she makes us see her as both perpetrator and victim of her own deep-laid, cold-blooded plots. It was this problematic nature of Kate's character--or, as she phrases it with succinct deadpan cool, the "bitchy attributes"--that attracted the actress to the role...
...controversial reworking of the text. In James, the eroticism is so finely distilled that it breaks through to the surface only fleetingly, and then restricted almost entirely to the violence of suggestion and language rather than action. Softley's contemporized approach works because of the genuine erotic chemistry between Bonham-Carter and Roache, which reaches its peak at the Venice Carnival (a script addition), only to disappear completely in the one explicit sex scene (definitely a script addition), which Softley deliberately deeroticizes to show the gulf that opens between Kate and Merton. Both the sexualized metaphor of the masked carnival...
...Bonham Carter's career has not lingered exclusively in Edwardiana; curiosity drives her into many movie landscapes. She is splendid as the impatient girlfriend of penniless poet Richard E. Grant in a lovely new film of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. She has played Marina Oswald (the TV movie Fatal Deception), Woody Allen's selfish wife (in Mighty Aphrodite), Sister Clare to Mickey Rourke's Francis of Assisi (no, really, in the 1989 Francesco), a French-speaking fashion designer (Portraits Chinois), a bachelor-party stripper (the BBC's Dancing Queen) and a scrubwoman who lops off vital parts...
...this last film, she declined Lars von Trier's offer of the lead role in Breaking the Waves, which earned Emily Watson an Oscar nomination as the simple Scottish girl who wills her paraplegic husband back to health. "Having lived with a father who was crippled for 17 years," Bonham Carter says, "I didn't buy the miracle at the end. It was a tough decision." She doesn't regret it. "I couldn't have done it. Emily Watson is much better than I would have been...