Word: heiress
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...market, this film streamlines Henry James's notoriously dense novel and brings its melodramatic and erotic undertones to the forefront. A well-bred but impoverished English girl (Helena Bonham-Carter), secretly engaged to an equally impecunious journalist (Linus Roache), persuades her lover to pay court to a young American heiress dying of TB (Alison Elliott). The plot thickens as the three take a pleasure trip to Venice. The scenes in Italy are lovely, and the three stars give superb performances--especially Bonham-Carter, who brilliantly captures the complexities of her character...
Streamlining Henry James's notoriously dense novel, this film brings its melodramatic and erotic undertones to the forefront. A well-bred but impoverished English girl (Helena Bonham-Carter), secretly engaged to an equally impecunious journalist (Linus Roache), persuades her lover to pay court to a young American heiress dying of TB (Alison Elliott). The plot thickens as the three take a pleasure trip to Venice. The close-up cinematography brings out the superb performances of the three stars--especially Bonham-Carter, who brilliantly captures her character's complexities...
Elliott, initially a tad bland as the "dove"-like American heiress, grows on you: though she never quite captures Milly's intense vitality and will to live, in her final scenes her placidity, affecting without being treacly, is vested with surprising grace. Roache (last seen in the lead role of the controversial Priest) delivers a convincing and finely nuanced performance as the attractive and passionate but indecisive lover who's neither quite strong nor quite weak enough to be a true...
...just a move from one Eaton Square town house to another. When The Wings of the Dove was offered, she thought, "Oh, not another costume drama--and in the period that I've done to death." True, but Kate, who prods her lover Merton to woo dying American heiress Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), is a more complex lady of breeding. She and Merton recall two other devious Europeans, also out to fleece a rich American girl, in James' The Portrait of a Lady. Here, though, the best role and much of the rooting interest go to the schemer...
...Heiress would be a better play if the Goetzes had as much compassion for Catherine as this cast and crew do, or if they at least portrayed her as consistently as James does. Nonetheless, small theatres don't come much better than the Lyric, and The Heiress is an evening full of riches indeed...