Word: isabell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...attractive American girl of the late 19th century, Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman) comes to England to visit her wealthy expatriate relatives. She succeeds in charming both her invalid cousin, Ralph Touchett (Martin Donovan), and a fine English lord (Richard Grant). But she refuses the lord's proposal of marriage and expresses her desire to see more of life. Her cousin, intrigued by her independent vision, persuades his dying father (John Gielgud) to leave her sufficient money to realize her dreams. Mr. Touchett complies, and upon his death Isabel inherits a fortune...
...Italy to begin her quest to "see life," but through the plotting of a duplicitous friend, Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey), gets ensnared by a cold-hearted aesthete and fortune-hunter, Gilber Osmond (John Malkovich). Their marriage quickly sours, and tensions between them rise to a crisis. First, Lord Warburton, Isabel's old suitor, reappears and begins to pay court to Pansy, Osmond's lovely but completely subjugated daughter. Later, Isabel learns that her cousin Ralph is dying...
...film opens with black-and-white shots of modern young women in the postures of liberation. An hour later there is a surrealist and, by Victorian standards, very racy peek into Isabel Archer's fantasy life. In every way, The Portrait of a Lady, director Jane Campion's version of the Henry James novel, provides steeply raked, hugely self-conscious angles on Isabel, who is often glimpsed in a murky bluish light. It's as if Campion were determined not to shoot a single frame that might be confused with a Merchant-Ivory production...
...easy to see why Isabel would attract Campion (The Piano), who is drawn to women trying to assert themselves against the social and sexual rigidities of their moment. On the other hand, Isabel's unfathomable devotion to the contemptible aesthete Gilbert Osmond (whose black heart John Malkovich always wears on his sleeve) seems in particular to flummox her feminism. This leads her and screenwriter Laura Jones to soften James' bleak conclusion, but long before that, this Portrait has blurred to the point of indistinction...
...this sensible? There's little doubt that it's time to sort out the confusion between federal and state duties. And by "marrying liberal ends with conservative means," as Urban Institute scholar Isabel Sawhill says a tax credit tries to do, we may be able to "get past our current impasse and find common ground." The real question is whether the social safety net is the right thing to devolve, as opposed to more dubiously "national" tasks like bridge building and job training...